Juan Carlos: Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy

by Paul Preston

Book Overview

Paul Preston, the author of the definitive biography Franco, explores the political and personal mysteries of the Spanish monarch's life in Juan Carlos, a story of unprecedented sweep and exquisite detail. Handed over to the Franco regime as a young boy, Juan Carlos was raised according to authoritarian traditions designed to make him a cornerstone of the dictatorship. How then did he later emerge as an emphatic defender of the democracy that began...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393058042
• ISBN13: 9780393058048
• Release Date: June 2004
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 614 Pages
• Weight: 2.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

masterful analysis, but a trying read

If I were rating this book on content alone, Preston would get 5 stars. However, his writing style hampers him somewhat. This unique biography traces what is supposedly the life of King Juan Carlos of Spain, a man for whom I have immense respect, from the fall of Alfonso XIII to the present, but it winds up being a historical analysis of the transition of Spain out of the Franco regime, similar to Preston's Triumph of Democracy in Spain, which I read for school, only longer and with more focus on Juan Carlos. I was initially disappointed because I wanted personal information about the king, [...]Or somehow get a copy of The King by Jose Luis de Vilallonga (good luck, I had to order it used from Australia). However, this book contains more information and analysis about Francoist and post-Francoist Spain than you will ever need in your entire life. Preston tells the tale largely with a mind for the role of Juan Carlos in it (the manipulation by his father, the restoration, the initial democratic difficulties, etc.) but this winds up being so complex that he constantly goes elsewhere. I liked the book but you need to read it in small chunks, because his writing is exhausting. It's very complex and dry and full of untranslated Spanish and acronyms, so don't read this while you're tired or you won't remember a thing. Preston obviously has a lot of enthusiasm for the subject, though, which comes across in his writing and the sheer volume of the work. Buy this book if you want a long, scholarly read!

Definitely a masterpiece!

The complete title of Paul Preston's book on the present Spanish monarch-- "Juan Carlos, Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy"--says it all. If you want to read about the king and his love of fast cars and beautiful women, consult the tabloids. Several biographies of his wife, Queen Sofía, a woman admired and beloved by most Spaniards for her strength, humanity, and dignity, have been written in Spanish. There are also many magazine articles about her in both Spanish and English. The author does assume that the reader has some knowledge of Spanish history. For those who don't, he has written a number of other books on the subject ("The Coming of the Spanish Civil War", "The Points of Revenge", and "A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War"). When I lived in Spain in the sixties, the prevailing opinion of most of my friends was that, when Franco died, the society would plunge in another civil war as Juan Carlos would never be able to stand up to the generals and lead the country toward becoming a democracy. Undoubtedly this is one of the reasons I found fascinating the abundance of details of how the king was able to do exactly that. Preston's book is a complete study of the process that does not cater to sensationalism. For that I also consider it a "masterpiece".

The Good King

Royalty demands sycophancy from its subjects, and this is especially the case for royal biography. Notwithstanding that it doesn't take too much for people to realize that most monarchs are deeply unattractive people. Whether it is the selfish, irresponsible house of Savoy so acutely delineated in Denis Mack Smith's Italy and its Monarchy, or the houses of Hohenzollern and Romanov leading their countries to disaster, or the fundamentally mediocre British monarchy as seen in the essays of David Cannadine, or for that matter Juan Carlos' irresponsible, shallow brother-in-law, Constantine II, the last king of Greece, monarchs are people who believe the rest of the world owes them a living. In 1931 it seemed that the Spanish branch of the Bourbons had met its own well-deserved fate, as King Alfonso went into exile and his countrymen formed a democratic republic. As Preston puts it, the royal family does not take exile well. Hemophiliac uncles, morganatic marriages, adulterous affairs, a deaf and dumb uncle whose son will be used by Preston to make Juan Carlos' life even more miserable, it all looked most unpromising. One detail that comes to mind is a picture of a four year old Juan Carlos in military uniform. It was only after he had been standing in it for hours that people realized that his books were too small and his feet had been rubbed raw. But on the whole this is a picture of Juan Carlos that is fairly sympathetic to him. After he appears on the scene, there is little gossip of the Eurotrash aspect of things. (Although we do learn that Juan Carlos accidentally shot his brother to death.) Juan Carlos, born in 1938, and his father Don Juan had to find a way to restore the monarchy after the Spanish Civil war. The problem was simple. Franco at the time made monarchist sentiments and many monarchists were among his followers. The problem was that he had no desire of sharing power with anyone, and himself had little respect for the previous monarchy which had tolerated a limited parliamentarianism. He suspected Don Juan might try to reconcille his divided country, and remove it from Franco's regime of divine vindictiveness. The problem for Don Juan, who spent most of Franco's reign living in Portugal, was that he had little to offer and little power to use it. Although much of the Francoist elite would have prefered to see a monarchy, they were not going to risk their power trying to force the issue. And so for until 1968 Don Juan waited, endured Franco's condescension and lies, occasionally got angry, was separated from his son for long periods of time at considerable psychological stress for both of them, and ended up doing what Franco wanted. Franco got the idea that Juan Carlos might be more ameneable to Francoist propaganda and so in 1948 he was sent to Spain and educated under Falangist tuetalage. Finally after two decades of toying with them, Franco made Juan Carlos, not his father, his heir apparent. Juan Carlos' pr

A very different kind of royal biography

Fans of the usual kinds of biographies about kings and princes should be careful about this one. It's a very good book, but it's likely to be very far from the sort of thing you're expecting. But then, King Juan Carlos of Spain's life has been very different from that of most modern royals. In a sense, this book is hardly even "about" him at all. Rather, it's an in-depth look at a transitional era in Spanish history, as well as at the man who, in many ways, was the pivot on which that transition turned. People looking for that kind of book will be rewarded here. Let me expand a little on what this book isn't, because I think that's important. There's not really very much in these pages about Juan Carlos' life outside the political realm. For example, the author mentions in passing toward the end of the book the king's "obsession with speed and with expensive sports in which he risked his life and which frequently caused him serious accidents and injuries" (p. 511). In most royal biographies, those kinds of things would be central to the story. Here, they're barely an aside. Likewise, Queen Sophia hardly appears here except tangentially in a political context. The Infantas and Prince Felipe show up even less. Is this book a well-rounded look at Juan Carlos as a man? No. But then, it doesn't seem like it's intended to be. What this book is, as I said, is a look at the king's role in helping Spain move from the Francoist dictatorship to the current popular democracy. That role was a central one -- not only at key moments like dismantling the 1981 coup attempt, but also in slowly, quietly, and yet unrelentingly keeping in check the forces that wanted to maintain Francoism even after the Caudillo's death in 1975. In telling this story, Paul Preston has produced a well-researched and well-sourced book that at times is almost overwhelming with its depth and detail. This is a book thick with names, dates, meetings, quotations ... I frankly found it slow going at times. Around page 300, I found myself asking (as I'm sure the people of Spain asked at the time), "Isn't Franco dead YET?!" Preston's discussion of the controversy about legalizing the Communist Party of Spain similarly seemed to go on for a really long time. And how many times did he need to repeat that the adolescent Juan Carlos' wishes were not consulted in the high-level negotiations between his father and Franco over how he was to be educated? A bit of familiarity with Spanish history and government would be useful to the reader too. Perhaps Preston assumes his reader has already read his biography of Franco, since he's pretty thin on what exactly the Spanish Civil War was all about, why Alfonso XIII had to leave Spain, and what precisely the oft-mentioned principles of the *Movimiento* really were. Similarly, Preston is quick to throw out names, events, and acronyms without always taking the time to explain who or what they are, or why (or if) they matter. Yet ultimately, all the dept

Not quite a masterpiece . . .

Other reviews of Professor Preston's biography of the King of Spain describe it as a masterpiece. For all its virtues, I am reluctant to go that far. No-one seeing the emotional pictures of the King and Queen of Spain and their family visiting the injured and bereaved in the wake of the bombing atrocities in Madrid on the 11th March can be in any doubt about the position and role of the Bourbon monarchy in contemporary Spain. Of all the European monarchs today, Juan Carlos I of Spain enjoys the greatest stature, primarily for his role in the nurturing and development of democracy in the wake of the decades of dictatorship under General Franco. The road to his coronation as King of Spain in 1975 was a long one and a hard one, indeed a dangerous road. From 1948 the two decades under the watchful and omnipresent eye of the Caudillo, the years of monarch-in-waiting after designation as Franco's successor, and as king after Franco's death, until the mid-1980s, were fraught with uncertainty, loneliness, political tension and intrigue, threats of military intervention, and, in 1981, a somewhat farcical but potentially deadly attempted coup by army officers who longed to return the country to the old days of the Caudillo. Professor Preston relates this history of Juan Carlos's youth, apprenticeship to Franco and succession to the throne with painstaking, sometimes numbing detail, all supported by a wealth of footnotes pointing to original sources. But it is very much a political, academic biography. Where Preston excels is in the elaboration of the intrigues of the Franco "court" in the years from 1948 to the Caudillo's death in 1975, and the thorny path, politically and morally, that Juan Carlos had to tread to ensure that the Bourbon monarchy would be restored on Franco's death. He had to contend not just with what Preston calls the Francoist "bunker" of hard-line Falangists and conservatives, but also his father, Prince Juan de Bourbon, Count of Barcelona, son of King Alfonso XIII (who had abdicated before the outbreak of the civil war). Juan de Bourbon firmly believed that he should be the king, despite the fact that it was long obvious that he was totally unacceptable to Franco; Juan Carlos's position as Franco's putative successor placed him an inextricably uncomfortable relationship with his father Prince Juan. Equally, Preston explores in great detail the jockeying and intrigue, the terrorism and the military plotting and unrest that followed the death of Franco, up to and including the failed coup of 1981. It is an impressive accomplishment. Why, then, do I qualify my praise of Professor Preston's book? First, I approached the book as a general interest reader, not as an academic, and as such I found the extraordinary detail that attends the telling of some episodes too much: politicians, ministers, and especially military officers come and go at a bewildering rate, many never to be heard of again. In this, the reader's comprehension is