Juan Carlos: Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy

by Paul Preston

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780006386933
Publisher:	Harper Perennial
Publication date:	08/15/2005
Edition description:	UK ed.
Pages:	642
Product dimensions:	5.06(w) x 7.81(h) x 1.59(d)

About the Author

Paul Preston, author of The Spanish Civil War, Franco, Juan Carlos, and The Spanish Holocaust, is the world’s foremost historian on twentieth-century Spain. A professor at the London School of Economics, he lives in London.

Table of Contents

1	In Search of a Lost Crown 1931-1948	1
2	A Pawn Sacrificed 1949-1955	52
3	The Tribulations of a Young Soldier 1955-1960	95
4	A Life Under Surveillance 1960-1966	148
5	The Winning Post in Sight 1967-1969	205
6	Under Suspicion 1969-1974	249
7	Taking Over 1974-1976	301
8	The Gamble 1976-1977	354
9	More Responsibility, Less Power: the Crown and golpismo 1977-1980	397
10	Fighting for Democracy 1980-1981	444
11	Living in the Long Shadow of Success 1981-2002	489
	Bibliography	521
	Notes	545
	Index	595
	Illustrations	613

Editorial Reviews

This book, written by one of the most energetic and respected historians of modern Spain, does not seek out salacious details or purport to tell the essence of the man. This is really a history of modern Spanish politics, the dictatorial years of Francisco Franco and the surprisingly central role the king played in bringing about Spain's peaceful transition to democracy.
— The Washington Post

Joshua Goode

An impressively thorough but tepid life of Spain's reigning Bourbon monarch, who helped foster democracy after the dark decades of the Franco junta. The hard-nosed dictator-who is, yes, still dead-had little use for the monarchy: he harbored reasonable suspicions that the Bourbons were inclined to liberal views, and he was quite happy to see them in exile in Switzerland. His attitude softened when, in 1946, the UN denounced Franco's government as an Axis regime, in fact if not in name, and "invited him to surrender the powers of government." Franco, determined to have his regime accepted as legitimate, promulgated a law of succession that declared that Spain was a Catholic kingdom with a monarch in residence-but, of course, with Franco sitting at the head of government. To emphasize this succession, Franco called for nine-year-old Juan Carlos, the heir to the Bourbon throne, to return to Spain and study under his tutelage. Juan Carlos did so, demonstrating a regal equanimity in the face of "the fact that his father, Don Juan, to all intents and purposes sold him into slavery." As Preston (History/London School of Economics; Franco, 1994) shows at altogether too much length, Juan Carlos absorbed the teachings of Don Francisco while keeping the liberal flame alive; on a state visit to the US, Juan Carlos told officials of the Nixon administration that he intended to steer his country toward democracy, plans that Franco was surely aware of and perhaps, Preston suggests, even approved of. Franco's death in November 1975 brought considerable resistance on the part of fascist loyalists, and a short-lived military coup in 1981; yet Juan Carlos managed to steer a middle course, restore democraticinstitutions, keep the army from seizing power, weather Basque terrorism and regional separatism, and elevate Spain from historical afterthought to its present prosperity and prominence. A useful biography, though overwritten and overlength; of particular interest to students of contemporary European politics.

Kirkus Reviews

"[Preston] is a master of narrative, with an eye for the arresting and sometimes horrific detail."

Daily Telegraph - Nicholas Gordon-Lennox