Juan Carlos: Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy. Paul Preston
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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