Juan Carlos: Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy. Paul Preston
Читать онлайн книгу.
was arranged for the young Prince. Juan Carlos expected to be received by Franco on 10 November at El Pardo but because of the situation provoked by the death of Carlos Méndez, the visit was postponed. It finally took place on 24 November. The ten-year-old approached the meeting with considerable trepidation and, as he put it himself, ‘understood little of what was being planned around me, but I knew very well that Franco was the man who caused such worry for my father, who was preventing his return to Spain and who allowed the papers to say such terrible things about him’. Before the boy’s departure, Don Juan had given his son precise instructions: ‘When you meet Franco, listen to what he tells you, but say as little as possible. Be polite and reply briefly to his questions. A mouth tight shut lets in no flies.’
The day of the visit was bitterly cold, and the sierra to the north of Madrid was covered with snow. The meeting was orchestrated with great discretion, with Danvila and Sotomayor driving Juan Carlos to El Pardo in the former’s private car and without a police escort. The Prince found the palace of El Pardo imposing, with its splendidly attired Moorish Guard at all of the gates. He had never seen so many people in uniform. Franco’s staff thronged the passageways of the palace, speaking always in low voices as if in church. After a lengthy walk through many gloomy salons, the Prince was finally greeted by Franco. He was rather taken aback by the rotund Caudillo who was much shorter and more pot-bellied than he had appeared in photographs. The dictator’s smile seemed to him forced. He asked the boy about his father. To Juan Carlos’s surprise, Franco referred to Don Juan as ‘His Highness’ and not ‘His Majesty’. To Franco’s visible annoyance, the boy replied, ‘The King is well, thank you.’ He enquired about Juan Carlos’s studies and invited him to join him in a pheasant hunt. In fact, the young Prince was paying little attention since he was transfixed by the sight of a little mouse that was running around the legs of Franco’s chair. Franco was, according to Danvila, ‘delighted with the Prince’.
As the interview was drawing to a close, Sotomayor shrewdly asked whether Juan Carlos might meet Franco’s wife. Doña Carmen appeared almost immediately, having been waiting for her cue. After being introduced, the Prince was taken by Franco for a tour of El Pardo, showing him, amongst other things, the bedroom in which Queen Victoria Eugenia had slept on the eve of her wedding, and which had been kept almost untouched ever since. Franco presented him with a shotgun and Juan Carlos then made his farewells. According to Danvila, in the car en route back to Las Jarillas, Juan Carlos said to him and Sotomayor, ‘This man is really rather nice, and so is his wife, although not as much.’ The Prince himself later claimed that the meeting had left no impression on him whatsoever. It is unlikely that the young Prince could have found Franco as ‘nice’ as Danvila reported after this first visit. Juan Carlos’s family had often spoken about the Caudillo in his presence, and ‘not always in complimentary terms’. In fact, as Juan Carlos’s mother would later recall, the Generalísimo was often referred to as the ‘little lieutenant’ in their household.113
The publicity given to the visit was handled in such a way as to give the impression that the monarchy was subordinate to the dictator. That, along with the torpedoing of the monarchist-Socialist negotiations, had been one of the principal objectives behind the entire Azor operation.114 At virtually no cost, Franco had left the moderate opposition in bitter disarray and driven a wedge between Don Juan and his most fervent and loyal supporters.115 Danvila would later recall the furious reaction in Estoril when Don Juan heard of this first meeting between Juan Carlos and Franco. Danvila was instructed thereafter not to let the young Prince carry out visits or attend any events that could be regarded as being in any way political. That the very idea of sending the Prince to Spain was a gamble for the family was revealed in a letter from Victoria Eugenia to Danvila: ‘I felt the greatest sorrow at having to be separated from the grandson that I love so much, but from the first moment that my son took the decision to send him to Spain, I respected his wishes without reservations … I approve of the search for a new direction in our policy since what we were doing before had provided no success and I believe that without risk there can be no gain. I pray to God that my son’s sacrifice produces a satisfactory result.’116 There could be no more poignant evidence of the fact that in the Borbón family, the sense of mission stood far above political principle and emotional considerations.
Franco had created a situation in which many influential members of the conservative establishment who had wavered since 1945 would incline again towards his cause. The press was ordered to keep references to the monarchy to a minimum. In international terms, the Caudillo had cleverly made his regime appear more acceptable. In the widely publicized report of a conversation with the British Labour MP for Loughborough, Dr Mont Follick, Franco declared that it was his intention to restore the monarchy although he sidestepped the question of when.117 In a context of growing international tension, the apparent ‘normalization’ of Spanish politics was eagerly greeted by the Western powers. Within less than a year, a deeply disillusioned Don Juan would order an end to the policy of conciliation.118 By then it would be too late, Franco having squeezed all possible advantage out of the pretended closeness between them.
CHAPTER TWO A Pawn Sacrificed 1949–1955
Juan Carlos’s new home was Las Jarillas, a grand Andalusian-style house, 17 kilometres outside Madrid on the road to Colmenar Viejo. One reason for its selection was its proximity both to El Pardo and the military garrison at El Goloso. A special direct telephone line to the base was installed in Danvila’s house in case of Falangist demonstrations against the Prince. Such daring would have been unlikely in Franco’s Spain and the nearest thing to public opposition was the singing of a ditty whose chorus went: ‘El que quiere una corona/que se haga de cartón/que la Corona de España/no es para ningún Borbón’ (He who wants a crown/better get a cardboard one/for the crown of Spain/will go to no Borbón). Shortly after his arrival, the boy suffered an acute bout of flu, perhaps another occasion on which the pain of separation from his parents was manifested physically.1 Used to absences from his family, Juan Carlos settled down relatively quickly at the school improvised for him at Las Jarillas. Although close to Madrid, it had not yet been overtaken by urban sprawl from the capital and still enjoyed an air of rural tranquillity. Its 100 hectares permitted hunting – mainly of rabbits. As it became obvious how much the Prince enjoyed shooting, he began to receive invitations to other hunts for larger prey such as wild deer and even wild boar.
Don Juan, with Franco’s approval, had hand-picked a group of tutors and eight aristocratic students. Four had been chosen from amongst Spain’s leading aristocratic families and others from the prosperous upper-middle classes: Alonso Álvarez de Toledo (son of the Marqués de Valdueza who, as an adult, would become an important figure in the Spanish financial world); Carlos de Borbón-Dos-Sicilias (Juan Carlos’s first cousin on his mother’s side, named for Juan Carlos’s maternal grandfather and godfather); Jaime Carvajal y Urquijo (son of the Conde de Fontanar); Fernando Falcó y Fernández de Córdoba (later Marqués de Cubas); Agustín Carvajal y Fernández de Córdoba (who would become an airline pilot); Alfredo Gómez Torres (a Valencian who would become an agronomist); Juan José Macaya (from Barcelona, who would become an economist and financial counsellor); and José Luis Leal Maldonado (the son of naval officer who was a friend of Don Juan, he would later be an important banker and Minister of the Economy from April 1979 to June 1980).
Juan Carlos was especially fond of his cousin, Carlos de Borbón-Dos-Sicilias, and the fact that they were allowed to share a room took the edge off his initial loneliness. During the Christmas holidays after his first term at Las Jarillas, the Prince had to write an essay on his school. It revealed more than just his disregard for punctuation: ‘On the day that I arrived, the boys were at the door waiting for me and I went in feeling really embarrassed with