Biography: Reading the recent and posthumously published devastating critique of former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar, 'La aznaridad' ('Aznaricity') by the outstanding Spanish novelist and commentator of his generation, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán ("Aznar put on the same smile at christenings as at burials"), one is tempted to resist any apotheosis of King Juan Carlos ("A People's King", as Paul Preston subtitles his new biography of the Spanish monarch, without question mark or quotation marks).
Juan Carlos: A People's King, like Preston's earlier biography of the dictator - and Juan Carlos's mentor - Gen Francisco Franco, is a cracking good read. However, it leaves as many tantalising questions unanswered about the man as it provides sumptuous, and often uncorroborated, conversational details about Juan Carlos's role in Spain's transition to democracy in the wake of Franco's prolonged demise in November 1975, when the "indefatigable Dr Martínez-Bordiu" operated again and again, bringing the dictator "back from the abyss". Dr Martínez-Bordiu right at the end, we are told, "continued feverishly to pump the Caudillo with antibiotics and sulphonamides".
King Juan Carlos has made at least two crucial public interventions, one of which (in the aftermath of the botched storming of the Spanish parliament, the Cortes, by Lt Col Tejero on February 23rd, 1981) is described at length by Preston. As commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Juan Carlos's public renunciation on television of the attempted coup solidified in many eyes the still burgeoning democracy of the new post-Franco Spain. However, because of Juan Carlos's substantial involvement throughout his life with the military - he had been educated at military academies at Zaragoza and Murcia, before beginning his university-level studies in El Escorial with private tutors, all under the close supervision of Gen Franco - doubts were to linger about the possible degree of royal support Tejero and his fellow conspirators believed they had. Preston comments that at Tejero's trial, "the defence lawyers did eventually base their strategy on the claim that the 'golpistas', as they were known, sincerely believed they were merely following Juan Carlos's orders". However, Preston provides convincing contrary evidence to the effect that, if the king had been involved, the coup would have succeeded.
King Juan Carlos's second intervention of recent historic note, and too recent to be referred to in Preston's work, was his very public intervention in the aftermath of the horrific Madrid bombings. His televised speech to the nation on Friday, March 12th and his undoubtedly felt outpouring of emotion at the funeral Mass in Madrid the following week, were warmly welcomed by the Spanish people. In that Friday address, his use of the familiar mode of address, "Vosotros", when addressing the Spanish people, unthinkable were there to be an equivalent in English, in, say, the Queen of England's Christmas address to her "subjects", allied to his strong defence of "our constitution which is the sovereign expression of the Spanish people" and "our faith in democracy", have ensured continuing support for Juan Carlos as king of a democratic Spain.
What is detailed in full by Preston is Juan Carlos's deeply fraught and problematic relationship with his own father, Don Juan de Borbón, son of Spain's last monarch, Alfonso XIII, who went into exile on April 14th, 1931, when the Spanish Republic was declared. But the most intriguing aspect of Preston's biography for me was undoubtedly the 20-year-long relationship of tutelage between Franco and Juan Carlos. Preston convincingly shows how Franco tutored Juan Carlos from his earliest years to be his successor, with a view to ensuring the continuation of the dictatorship's crusading aim to retain in perpetuity an uncompromisingly Catholic Spain.
Preston's delineation of Franco is at times extraordinary. A full 11 years before his death, we are invited to observe "his halting walk and a vacant, open-mouthed expression". Franco is "lost to the world, his speeches muttered incomprehensibly". The week in 1969 in which the moon walk by the Apollo XI astronauts was televised coincided with this reviewer's first week in Spain as a young student. I recall with astonishment watching Franco's televised appearance two days later at the Cortes, when he announced to Spain and the world that his successor was to be Prince Juan Carlos de Borbón.
Preston's words reawaken that memory: "In his emotional speech, tears running down his cheeks, and audible sobs interrupting his mumbling delivery," Franco named as his successor Juan Carlos, who, in Franco's words, "has been perfectly prepared for the high mission for which he has been called".
Preston's narrative is compelling throughout, though it suffers at times from unnecessary hyperbole. The millions of Spaniards who endured substantial hardship during the Franco years will hardly empathise with Preston's lachrymose sentiment, repeated more than once, that "Juan Carlos's childhood and his adolescence had been stolen from him". I am also alarmed at several lengthy, unsatisfactory , commentaries that Preston incorporates. One of many examples is the word-for-word recounting of an emotional encounter between the prince and his father, Don Juan, after Juan Carlos's nomination by Franco. An excessive reliance by Preston on uncorroborated verbatim testimony of the Catalán monarchist and professor of law, Laureano López Rodó, strikes me as a vitiating feature of Preston's culling of evidence. Whatever about ability to recall events that did or did not take place - witness recent tribunal evidence here in Ireland - linguistic recall is surely even more fraught. In the interests of a compelling narrative, such as Preston's often is, the boundaries of historiography and fiction are frequently blurred. But then, what is the "writing out of a life" ("bio-graphy") especially, if not a sort of fiction?
What is not broached in this biography is the institution of monarchy itself. In an important recent statement by an outstanding Spanish poet and thinker, Carlos Alvarez, the institution itself is critiqued: "In 1977," Alvarez writes, "because Francoist forces were still in positions of power, the Spanish people were not given an opportunity to accept or reject a monarchy. The last time the Spanish people were able to choose between a monarchy and a republic was on April 14th, 1931, and they chose a republic."
The subtitle of Preston's biography, "A People's King", is perhaps susceptible to more than one reading, and may still, who knows, carry a question mark.