Paul Preston - Juan Carlos - Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy

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A powerful biography of Spain’s great king, Juan Carlos, by the pre-eminent writer on 20th-century Spanish history.There are two central mysteries in the life of Juan Carlos, one personal, the other political.The first is the apparent serenity with which he accepted that his father had surrendered him, to all intents and purposes, into the safekeeping of the Franco regime. In any normal family, this would have been considered a kind of cruelty or, at the very least, baleful negligence. But a royal family can never be normal, and the decision to send the young Juan Carlos away from Spain was governed by a certain ‘superior’ dynastic logic.The second mystery lies in how a prince raised in a family with the strictest authoritarian traditions, who was obliged to conform to the Francoist norms during his youth and educated to be a cornerstone of the plans for the reinforcement of the dictatorship, eventually sided so emphatically and courageously with democratic principles.Paul Preston – perhaps the greatest living commentator on modern Spain – has set out to address these mysteries, and in so doing has written the definitive biography of King Juan Carlos. He tackles the king’s turbulent relationship with his father, his cloistered education, his bravery in defending Spain’s infant democracy after Franco’s death and his immense hard work in consolidating parliamentary democracy in Spain. The resulting biography is both rigorous and riveting, its vibrant prose doing justice to its vibrant subject. It is a book fit for a king.

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In the early autumn of 1960, in his capacity as president of Don Juan’s Privy Council, José María Pemán asked Franco to reveal his plans with regard to the succession. The Caudillo replied that he would be succeeded by the ‘traditional monarchy’, whose ‘incumbent’ he told Pemán with a straight face was Don Juan. He described him as ‘a good man, a gentleman and a patriot’. Compounding this farrago of deception, he denied that Don Juan had been eliminated and claimed that the thought of choosing Juan Carlos instead had never crossed his mind. He said that the Prince, ‘because of his age, is an unknown quantity’. In any case, he then went on to reveal that he had no intention of proclaiming the monarchy for a very long time: ‘My health is good and I can still be useful to my Fatherland.’ 130

CHAPTER FOUR A Life Under Surveillance 1960–1966

In October 1960, Franco received a perceptive report on Juan Carlos from one of his intelligence agents in Portugal. Commenting on the Prince’s presence at the celebration of his parents’ silver wedding anniversary, he wrote: ‘It is certainly the case that Juan Carlos seems more mature by the day, despite the patience and the humility that he has to put on in front of his father. Don Juan treats him harshly, even more so when there is someone present, and is constantly saying “your place is behind me”. It produces discord. The split probably won’t come because there’ll be a marriage and with it a new house, a new life and distance from his father who has got him tightly bound, like the feet of young Chinese girls in iron shoes. At the moment, and we know this from several sources, Juan Carlos is keen to get back to Spain and is fed up with his father and with his grandmother Doña Victoria Eugenia, whose company he finds every day more irksome. Marriage then is a political solution, a device so that the cord doesn’t break altogether.’ Franco must have been delighted to read that: ‘Juan Carlos feels happy only when he is away from Villa Giralda and with his Spanish friends. He has two personalities, one serious, sad and submissive towards his father, and the other when he is out of Don Juan’s sight, among his friends.’ 1

At the time, it was strongly rumoured that the announcement of his engagement to María Gabriella di Savoia was imminent. The persistence of these rumours provoked frequent denials from Estoril. In early January 1961, as part of this process, Don Juan gave a long interview to Il Giornale d’Italia

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