Juan Carlos: Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy

Even when phone calls from home were finally permitted by Don Juan, they remained, for a long time, few and far between. This silence from his parents must have been very painful, since Juan Carlos was given no explanation. It was hardly surprising that he felt that they had simply forgotten him. His unhappiness at Ville Saint-Jean was intensified by the fact that he quickly fell foul of the school’s rigid discipline. His teachers there would later remember him as a handsome but indisciplined eight-year-old of average intelligence, with a lively sense of humour. They considered him to have been spoilt by overindulgent nannies in the past: ‘they had let him get away with virtually everything so that he considered himself as lord and master wherever he happened to be.’ Father Julio de Hoyos, one of Juan Carlos’s teachers, recalled how the Prince refused to attend his first class at the school: he had physically to carry the boy to the classroom and then to slap him in order to make him sit quietly and pay attention. No one seems to have considered that the boy’s behaviour and poor academic performance were symptoms of his desperate unhappiness at being separated from his parents.79

In November 1980, Juan Carlos recounted to the English biographer of his grandmother his vivid memories of how important Queen Victoria Eugenia was to him during this period. She frequently visited him at his school. Although deeply conscious of the responsibilities of royalty, she had a warm relationship with him. Remembering her own difficulties with the Spanish language when she first arrived in Madrid at the turn of the century, she was determined that Juan Carlos would not suffer embarrassment or criticism as a result of having a foreign accent. Having been brought up in Italy and Switzerland, speaking French as much as Spanish, he had a noticeable accent, particularly in his pronunciation of the crucial letter ‘r’. The majority of the pupils at Ville Saint-Jean were French and all classes were in French. Victoria Eugenia taught him to trill the ‘r’ in the Spanish style and to drop the French explosive ‘r’ which sounds so comical to Spaniards.80 At the beginning of the 1946 Christmas holiday, Victoria Eugenia accompanied Juan Carlos on his trip back to Estoril. On the boy’s arrival, Eugenio Vegas Latapié, Don Juan’s political secretary, resumed his duties as tutor, in order to prepare him for his future royal tasks, and would also accompany him back to Switzerland after the holidays. Astonishingly, Vegas was allowed to smack the Prince when he was naughty – although without hurting him. Despite Vegas Latapié’s intellectually imposing and austere character, they had established a good relationship. He laid the basis for the boy’s later conservatism – along with emphasis on Spain’s one-time imperial glories, he taught him the anthem of the Spanish Foreign Legion, which Juan Carlos would find profoundly moving thereafter.81 Before Don Juan had left Lausanne, Father Carles Cardó, the distinguished Catalan theologian, in exile in Switzerland, said to him, ‘Sir, be careful that Eugenio Vegas Latapié doesn’t turn the Prince into a new Philip II.’ By this stage, Juan Carlos was already exhibiting an emotional (though naïvely expressed) concern for Spain’s internal affairs. Vegas Latapié remembers that one day, the Prince told him that he had ‘promised God not to eat chocolates again until an important political event takes place in Spain’. Vegas Latapié replied that this seemed rather too big a promise for a child to make and that he might not be able to eat chocolates for a very long time if he kept it. When Juan Carlos asked him what he should do, Vegas Latapié replied that he ought to go to confession. He then absolved him of his promise and told him not to make similar ones in the future.82

Franco’s anger at the monarchist enthusiasm generated by Don Juan’s arrival in Portugal continued to fester. He sent a note to Don Juan breaking off relations between them on the grounds that he had given his permission only for the Pretender to make a two-week visit to Portugal, yet he and his Privy Council were fomenting monarchist conspiracy against him. Franco acted out of pique, but there was a strong element of calculation in his reaction. The more daring monarchists now began to seek contacts on the left but many of the more opportunistic conservatives who had signed the letter welcoming Don Juan scuttled back to Franco.83 In response, at the end of February 1946, Don Juan attempted to woo a broad spectrum of Spanish opinion, including the ultra-conservative Carlists, by issuing another manifesto, known as the Bases de Estoril. It was a draft constitution for the monarchy and contrasted with the earlier Lausanne Manifesto in promising a brand of Catholic corporatism. The Bases de Estoril did not succeed in convincing the Carlists, but the document did antagonize his more liberal supporters.84

In fact, all was not well within Don Juan’s camp. Vegas Latapié tended to place considerable hopes on Allied intervention to restore the monarchy. On 4 March 1946, a Tripartite Declaration of the United States, Great Britain and France announced that: ‘As long as General Franco continues in control of Spain, the Spanish people cannot anticipate full and cordial association with those nations of the world which have, by common effort, brought defeat to German Nazism and Italian Fascism, which aided the present Spanish regime in its rise to power and after which the regime was patterned.’ Pedro Sainz Rodríguez, however, argued vehemently that the real significance of the Declaration lay in the statement that: ‘There is no intention of interfering in the internal affairs of Spain. The Spanish people themselves must in the long run work out their own destiny.’ Sainz Rodríguez would argue, against the views of Vegas Latapié and Gil Robles, that Don Juan must seek some rapprochement with the Caudillo.85

Don Juan was sufficiently concerned by the hostility emanating from Franco and the Falange to instruct Juan Carlos’s teachers at Ville Saint-Jean to destroy any gifts of sweets, chocolates and other delicacies sent to the Prince by well-wishers, for fear of attempts to poison him. Eventually, Don Juan became uneasy about Juan Carlos being left alone in Switzerland and finally, in April 1946, called for his son to rejoin the family at Estoril. It opened a brief period of relative normality, with the boy able to attend a local school, the Colegio Amor de Deus. He made many friends and could spend time with his family and pursuing hobbies like horse-riding, sailing and football.86 Juan Carlos’s education at Estoril remained under the overall supervision of Vegas Latapié. In spite of his tutor’s rigid conservatism and insistence on discipline and formality, the young Prince became increasingly attached to him, later describing him as ‘a wonderful man’. According to Juan Carlos, Vegas Latapié believed that the heir to the throne: ‘should be educated with no concession to the weaknesses that seem normal to commoners. Accordingly, he brought me up to understand that I was a being apart, with many more duties and responsibilities than anyone else.’87

In early December 1946, the United Nations denounced the Axis links of Franco and invited him to ‘surrender the powers of government’. It was highly unlikely that there would be any Allied intervention against the Caudillo, but Franco responded as if there was such a threat by mounting a massively orchestrated popular demonstration in the Plaza de Oriente on 9 December. On 12 December, a plenary session of the General Assembly resolved to exclude Spain from all its dependent bodies, called upon the Security Council to study measures to be adopted if, within a reasonable time, Spain still had a government lacking popular consent; and called on all member nations to withdraw their ambassadors.88 At the cabinet meeting on 13 December, Franco crowed that the United Nations was ‘fatally wounded’.89

Nevertheless, Franco put considerable effort into making his regime more acceptable to the Western democracies. On 31 December 1946, Captain Carrero Blanco drafted a memorandum urging Franco to institutionalize his regime as a monarchy and then give it the veneer of ‘democratic’ legitimacy with a referendum. Building on the ideas first discussed in cabinet in April 1945, it was clearly an attempt to counter the threat of Don Juan as perceived by Franco. There could be no other interpretation to the central argument that the ‘personal deficiencies’ of any hereditary monarch could be neutralized by Franco remaining as Head of State and the King being subject to the advice of his vacuous consultative body, the Consejo del Reino, made up of loyal nominees of Franco. The Caudillo knew that an even simpler solution was never to restore the monarchy in his lifetime. Carrero Blanco’s memorandum was thus refined further in another working paper presented on 22 March 1947, which suggested that Franco name his own royal successor.90

Franco quickly implemented Carrero Blanco’s plans to give his regime the trappings of acceptability. Carrero Blanco’s ideas formed the basis of a draft text of the Ley de Sucesión (Law of Succession) and were discussed in a cabinet meeting on 28 March 1947. The first Article declared that: ‘Spain, as a political unit, is a Catholic, social and representative state which, in keeping with her tradition, declares herself constituted as a kingdom.’ The second Article declared that: ‘The Head of State is the Caudillo of Spain and of the Crusade, Generalísimo of the Armed Forces, Don Francisco Franco Bahamonde.’91 The regime’s Axis connections would simply be painted over with a monarchist veneer. The declaration that Franco would govern until prevented by death or incapacity, the Caudillo’s right to name his own royal successor, the deafening silence on the royal family’s rights of dynastic succession, the statement that the future King must uphold the fundamental laws of the regime and could be removed if he departed from them – all this showed that only the label had changed.

This elaborate deception aimed to buy time from both the Western Allies and monarchists inside Spain. Its success was dependent upon Don Juan speaking the right lines and not denouncing it. That part of the show was handled with notable clumsiness. On the day before the Ley de Sucesión was to be made public, Carrero Blanco arrived in Estoril. He carried an emolient message to Don Juan, implying that if he identified himself with the regime and were patient, he could be Franco’s heir. Carrero Blanco had been ordered by Franco to seek an audience for precisely 31 March, in order to deny Don Juan the possibility of doing anything to impede the project that was to be announced that evening. Believing that he was being consulted about a draft, Don Juan candidly told Carrero Blanco that Franco could hardly pretend to be the restorer of the monarchy when he was prohibiting monarchist activities. Regarding the issue of his identification with the regime, he told Franco’s emissary of his determination to be King of all Spaniards. This stung Carrero into a blunt statement of the Francoist view of politics: ‘In Spain in 1936 a trench was dug; and you are either on this side of the trench or else on the other … You should think about the fact that you can be King of Spain but only of the Spain of the Movimiento Nacional: Catholic, anti-Communist, anti-liberal and fiercely free of any foreign influence in its policies.’92 As he took his farewell, Carrero Blanco said nothing when Don Juan promised to read the text of the Ley de Sucesión and give him his opinion the next day.

When Don Juan had retired to his rooms, Carrero slipped back to the Villa Bel Ver and left a message with an official of the royal household that Franco would be going on national radio that night to announce the definitive text of the new law. He left hastily before Don Juan was given the message. At a dinner party attended by members of the Spanish Embassy in Lisbon, Don Juan gave vent to his fury at Carrero Blanco, saying, ‘that bastard Carrero came to try to shut me up.’ The remark was duly reported back to Madrid and ensured Carrero Blanco’s undying resentment of Don Juan. In the medium term, this cheap deception inclined Don Juan and his advisers to strengthen their links with the left-wing anti-Franco opposition.93 On 7 April 1947, Don Juan issued the ‘Estoril Manifesto’ denouncing the illegality of the succession law’s proposed alteration of the nature of the monarchy without consultation with either the heir to the throne or the people. Franco, Martín Artajo and Carrero Blanco agreed that Don Juan had thereby eliminated himself as a suitable successor to the Caudillo.

On 13 April, the Observer, the BBC and the New York Times published declarations by Don Juan – drawn up by Eugenio Vegas Latapié and Gil Robles, in collaboration with the exiled Spanish scholar Rafael Martínez Nadal – to the effect that he was prepared to reach an agreement with Franco only if it was limited to the details of the peaceful and unconditional transfer of power. Since Don Juan had declared himself in favour of a democratic monarchy, the legalization of political parties and trade unions, a degree of regional decentralization, religious freedom and even a partial amnesty, Franco was livid. He later told his faithful confidant and head of his military household, his cousin Francisco Franco Salgado-Araujo ‘Pacón’, that it was the Observer interview that led him to contemplate Juan Carlos as his eventual successor. He unleashed a furious press campaign against Don Juan, denouncing him as the tool of international freemasonry and Communism. The fury of his reaction intensified the divisions within Don Juan’s group of advisers. Against the anti-Franco line of Eugenio Vegas Latapié and José María Gil Robles, Pedro Sainz Rodríguez had come to the conclusion that Franco increasingly held all the cards and thus advocated a tactic of conciliation towards him. Distressed by the press assault, Don Juan began to incline towards Sainz Rodríguez’s view. In consequence, in the autumn of 1947, Vegas Latapié resigned as his secretary.94

The Ley de Sucesión was rubber-stamped by the Cortes in June and endorsed by a carefully choreographed referendum on 6 July 1947.95 Long before this plebiscite, Franco had been, in every respect, acting as if he were King of Spain, even dispensing titles of nobility. Ironically, as part of the campaign for the referendum, spectacular propaganda was made out of the visit to Spain by the glamorous María Eva Duarte de Perón (Evita) in June 1947. The publicity given to the visit implied that Evita had come just to see Franco, and the Movimiento press omitted to mention that she was also visiting Portugal, Italy, the Vatican, Switzerland and France. In Portugal, she visited Don Juan. Greeting him effusively – according to José María Pemán, she kissed him on both hands and part of his forearm – she had no hesitation in giving him a spot of advice about the Ley de Sucesión. Take the crown from whoever offers it,’ she told him, ‘you’ll have plenty of time later to give him a good kick in the backside.’ When Don Juan stopped laughing, he replied, ‘There are certain things that a lady can say and a King cannot do.’96

Meanwhile, the now nine-year-old Juan Carlos exhibited a precocious concern for events in Spain. In January 1947, shortly after his first communion, Don Juan had suggested to one of the monarchists who had come from Spain, José María Cervera, that he give the Prince an account of the Spanish Civil War. Juan Carlos reacted by asking: ‘And why does Franco, who was so good during the war, treat us so badly now?’97 However, Don Juan came to realize that sporadic contact with monarchists, fascinating though it might be for the young Prince, hardly added up to an education. Accordingly, the happy period, just 18 months, that Juan Carlos had been able to spend in Estoril came to an end. In late 1947, Don Juan sent his son back to the severe Marian fathers of Ville Saint-Jean, again under the supervision of Vegas Latapié.

The promulgation of the Ley de Sucesión, and its potential permanent exclusion of his family from the Spanish throne, led Don Juan to seek wider support for a restoration. In London for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Lieutenant Philip Mount-batten on 20 November 1947, Don Juan had a brief meeting with Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary. He also met State Department officials in Washington in the spring of 1948. He was forced to accept that, in the context of the Cold War, the Western powers had little stomach for the removal of Franco. In an effort to convince them that the departure of the dictator would not lead to another civil war, throughout the first eight months of 1948, Gil Robles and Sainz Rodríguez tried to negotiate a pact with the leader of the Socialist Party, the PSOE, Indalecio Prieto. Agreement was finally reached at St Jean de Luz on 24 August. The text was sent to Estoril for Don Juan’s approval, but the days passed and there came no reply. Then to the consternation of both Prieto and the monarchist negotiators, the news arrived that Don Juan had met Franco on 25 August. Prieto said, ‘I look like a total bastard in the eyes of my party. I’ve got such big horns that I can’t get through the door,’ a reference to the Spanish expression for sexual betrayal, poner los cuernos.98

Don Juan had been sufficiently impressed by the strength of Franco’s position to consider some form of conciliation. The Caudillo, for his part, was now toying with the idea of grooming Juan Carlos as a possible heir. Although the tension between the two was not in the interests of either, all of the advantages lay with Franco. He knew that the United States would not risk provoking the fall of his regime through economic blockade, lest the left rather than Don Juan benefited. In mid-January 1948, messages had also been sent to Don Juan urging him to seek some agreement with Franco.99 Pressure also came from Don Juan’s most conservative supporters in Madrid – his senior representatives in Spain, the Duque de Sotomayor (also head of the royal household), José María Oriol, and two even more reactionary monarchists, the Conde de Vallellano and Julio Danvila Rivera, both of whom had been active members of the ultra-right-wing monarchist organization, Renovación Española, during the Second Republic. They hoped, with no concern whatsoever for the welfare of Juan Carlos, to negotiate with Franco by using the boy as a pawn.

In Switzerland, far from his family, Juan Carlos’s loneliness was hardly mitigated by the company of Eugenio Vegas Latapié, for all his affectionate concern. In February 1948, the sense of being left alone was intensified when his parents went on a long trip to Cuba as the guests of King Leopold of Belgium. Juan Carlos began to suffer headaches and earache. It was not the only time that his distress at the separation from his parents would manifest itself in illness. Vegas Latapié took him to a clinic where he was diagnosed as having otitis, a severe inflammation of the inner ear. It was necessary that he have a small operation to perforate the eardrum. With the boy’s parents entirely out of touch, this meant an enormous responsibility for Vegas Latapié. With the greatest difficulty, he finally managed to contact Queen Victoria Eugenia who granted permission for the operation to go ahead. Juan Carlos’s ears suppurated so much that his pillow had to be changed several times during the first night. Juan Carlos had to spend 12 days in the clinic, his only regular visitor Vegas Latapié. His grandmother visited him only once. A sense of just how sad he was can be deduced from his anxiety to please. Vegas Latapié had spoken to him of the merit in eating what was put in front of him even if it was not exactly what he liked. He then discovered him eating, with the greatest difficulty, a plate of dry, indigestible ravioli. When Vegas asked why, he replied, ‘I promised you I’d eat it.’100

Danvila and Sotomayor were suggesting to Franco the many advantages to be derived from having Juan Carlos in Spain. News of the monarchist negotiations with the PSOE galvanized the Caudillo into arranging a meeting with Don Juan on his yacht, the Azor. At first, precisely because of the negotiations with the Socialists in France, Don Juan fended off various invitations passed to him by the courtiers in Madrid. However, he was aware of the difficult situation in which the monarchist cause found itself and was also concerned about the education of his son. Danvila visited him in Estoril and finally Don Juan agreed to meet the Caudillo in the Bay of Biscay, on 25 August 1948.101 Don Juan omitted to inform his own close political advisers, even Gil Robles.

When Don Juan came aboard the Azor, Franco greeted him effusively and, to Don Juan’s bemusement, cried profusely. They then spoke alone in the main cabin for three hours. Apart from the short official account given to the Spanish press, the only detailed information derives from Don Juan’s various accounts. The emotional outburst over, Franco quickly gave Don Juan the impression that he believed him to be an idiot, entirely in the hands of embittered advisers and totally ignorant of Spain. Barely allowing him to get a word in edgeways, the Caudillo counselled patience and blithely reassured Don Juan that he was in splendid health and expected to rule Spain for at least another 20 years. To the consternation of Don Juan, he spoke of his devotion to Alfonso XIII, and again wept. Franco claimed that there was no enthusiasm within Spain either for a monarchy or for a republic although he boasted that he could, if he wished, make Don Juan popular in a fortnight. He was nonplussed when Don Juan asked him why, if the creation of popularity was so easy, he constantly used popular hostility as an excuse for not restoring the monarchy. The only reason that the Caudillo could cite was his fear that the monarchy would not have the firmness of command necessary. In contrast to what he must have supposed to be Don Juan’s practice, he declared, ‘I do not allow my ministers to answer me back. I give them orders and they obey.’ The meeting took a dramatic turn for the worse when, exasperated by Franco’s patronizing distortions of history, Don Juan reminded him that in 1942, he had promised to defend Berlin with a million Spanish soldiers. As the temperature plummeted, Franco stared at him silently.

In fact, there were many reasons why Franco had already eliminated Don Juan as his successor. His real motive for arranging the meeting finally emerged when he expressed his desire for the now ten-year-old Prince Juan Carlos to complete his education in Spain. The advantages to Franco were obvious. Juan Carlos would be a hostage whose presence in Spain would create the impression of royal approval of Franco’s indefinite assumption of the role of regent. It would make it easier for the Allies to accept that things were changing in Spain. Moreover, in Franco’s hands, the Prince would also be an instrument to control the activities of Don Juan and the entire political direction of any future monarchical restoration. Speaking with his habitual combination of cunning and prejudice, Franco patronizingly instructed Don Juan about the dangers run by princes under foreign influence. Don Juan pointed out that it would be impossible for his son to go to Spain while it remained an offence to shout ‘¡Viva el Rey’; (Long live the King) and active monarchists were subjected to fines and police surveillance. Franco offered to change all that, but no firm agreement was made about the future education of Juan Carlos.102

Don Juan had agreed to meet Franco because he had already reached the conclusion that the Caudillo would survive and that a future monarchical restoration would happen only with his approval. He told an official of the American Embassy in Lisbon that before the Azor meeting, his relations with Franco were at an impasse and that now he had got ‘his foot in the door’. The price was a serious weakening of his position. To the delight of Franco, secret police reports revealed that some of Don Juan’s supporters were outraged at what they saw as treachery to the monarchy and were inclined to abandon his cause.103 His most prominent representatives in Spain were deep in Franco’s pocket. The Duque de Sotomayor and Julio Danvila, acting as intermediaries from El Pardo, pressed Don Juan for a decision about Juan Carlos’s education. He hesitated on the grounds that any announcement about the issue would be used by Franco to imply that he had abdicated.