It has been argued that censorship is to be held responsible for some particularities of early Portuguese Romanticism: its preference for moralizing works, the absence of the novel as an established literary genre, and the association of French novels with moral corruption. However, these arguments were never corroborated by empirical evidence. This study sets out precisely to offer up the evidence. An analysis of documents from the Torre do Tombo National Archives indicates that, during the nineteenth century, a translated novel would be banned by the censors for being “lustful” or “improper” if it was considered to be lacking in moral utility. Evidence shows that the first French novels translated into Portuguese that did not meet the requirement of moral utility were translated abroad and exported by Parisian publishing houses to Portugal, whereas Portuguese translators self-censored their translations in accordance with the requirements that works be morally useful. As such, censorship contributed substantially to shaping the nineteenth-century Portuguese codified poetics.