I have always heard of this supposed French influence but I could never find an official source reporting how this happened, so I always thought it was a myth in Brazilian common knowledge. Would you have some reference to spare?
And I would like to point that, though BP is most likely more phonologically conservative than EP (as Galician and Camões' metric show), EP morphology is more conservative, while syntax is a mixed bag.
I support the thesis of linguists from the University of São Paulo and the Federal University of Brasília that the diglossia between the PT-BR and the PT-PT is, in itself, enough for the PT-BR to be declared a new language. In addition to the language spoken by the colonizers that arrived in Brazil already being different from that used by elites in Europe, in Brazil, this Portuguese still received influence from indigenous and African languages beyond the Spanish and, later, various European languages brought by immigrants between 1850 and 1950, mainly Italian with regard to the center-south of the country. In my opinion, which is also the opinion of the common citizen, Brazilian Portuguese should be recognized as a national language and its regional variants (dialects) as regional languages. In my specific case, my native idiom is “Mineiro” and I am polyglot: I speak Mineiro, Brazilian Portuguese (simply Brazilian) and European Portuguese (simply, Portuguese). For while, I adopt the following language tree:
Source:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineiro