Juan Carlos: Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy. Paul Preston
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sharp intelligence but seemed hardly suitable to be mentor to a four-year-old child, particularly one who was far from intellectually precocious. Inevitably, Vegas Latapié’s nomination as the boy’s tutor did little for the rather introverted Juan Carlos. Neither his tutor nor his father took much notice of him, their attention being absorbed by the progress of the War and plans for the return of Don Juan to the throne. Initially, Vegas Latapié’s role was, at Don Juan’s request, to give Spanish classes to Juan Carlos because the boy spoke the language with some difficulty, having a French accent and using many Gallicisms. When Juan Carlos reached the age of five, he began to attend classes at the Rolle School, in Lausanne. Vegas Latapié would accompany him to school in the morning and pick him up in the afternoon, using the trip to give the boy his extremely partisan and reactionary view of Spain’s past.42
The relationship between Don Juan and Franco was developing in such a way as to dictate the direction of the young Prince’s later childhood, his adolescence and his adulthood. Fearful that the approaches made to the Germans by Don Juan’s supporters might bear fruit, on 12 May 1942, Franco had written him another patronizing letter based on his bizarre interpretation of Spanish history. In it, he rejected the notion that there was support in Spain for a restoration and reiterated his rejection of everything associated with the constitutional monarchy that fell in 1931. Linking the greatness of imperial Spain with modern Fascism, he stated that the only monarchy that could be permitted was a totalitarian one such as he associated with Queen Isabella I of Castile. He made it clear that there would be no restoration in the near future, and none at all unless the Pretender were to express his commitment to the Spanish single party, FET y de las JONS (Falange Española Traditionalist a y de las juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista), created in 1937 by the forced unification of all right-wing parties.43
Don Juan did not reply to Franco’s letter of May 1942 for ten months. The outbreak of violent clashes between monarchists and Falangists – and the consequent removal of Ramón Serrano Suñer – in mid-August 1942 boosted his confidence. The Allied landings in North Africa on 8 November 1942 convinced him that the best chance of a restoration was to distance himself from Franco and persuade the Allies that, after the War, the monarchy could provide both stability and national reconciliation. On 11 November 1942, barely three days after the landings, Don Juan’s most powerful supporter, General Alfredo Kindelán, the most senior general on active service and Captain-General of Catalonia, travelled to Madrid. After discussing recent events with the rest of the high command, Kindelán informed the Caudillo in unequivocal terms that if he had committed Spain formally to the Axis then he would have to be replaced as Head of State. In any case, he advised Franco to proclaim Spain a monarchy and declare himself regent. Franco swallowed his fury and responded in a conciliatory – and deceitful – way. He denied any formal commitment to the Axis, implied that he was anxious to relinquish power and confided that he wanted Don Juan to be his ultimate successor. Franco was seething. After a cautious interval of three months, he replaced Kindelán as Captain-General of Catalonia.44
When Don Juan did finally reply to Franco’s letter, in March 1943, his tone was altogether more confrontational than before. He questioned Franco’s exercise of absolute power without institutional or juridical basis and expressed alarm at both the continued divisions within Spain and the international situation. He firmly informed Franco that it was his patriotic duty to: ‘abandon the current transitory and one-man regime in order to establish once and for all the system which, according to Your Excellency’s oft-repeated phrase, forged the greatness of our fatherland’. He bluntly stated that he found entirely unacceptable Franco’s vague formula of delaying the return of the monarchy until his work was done. Then, in terms that can only have horrified Franco, Don Juan roundly rejected the Caudillo’s call for him to identify with the Falange, asserting that any link with a specific ideology ‘would mean the outright denial of the very essence of the value of monarchy which is radically opposed to the provocation of partisan divisions and domination by political cliques and is rather the highest expression of the interests of the entire nation and the supreme arbiter of the antagonistic tensions inevitable in any society’.
In his letter, Don Juan outlined the formula for the eventual restoration of a democratic monarchy in Spain on the basis of national reconciliation – although he cannot have imagined that it would take a further 32 years. Recalling Alfonso XIII’s declaration in 1931 that he was ‘Rey de todos los españoles’ (King of all Spaniards), Don Juan presented Franco with a slap in the face for which he would never be forgiven: ‘In fact, my arrival on the throne after a cruel civil war should, in contrast, appear to all Spaniards – and this is precisely the transcendental service that the monarchy, and only the monarchy, can offer them – not as an opportunist government of a particular historical moment or of exclusive and changing ideologies, but rather as the sublime symbol of a permanent national reality and the guarantee of the reconstruction, on the basis of harmony, of Spain, complete and eternal.’45
Franco’s outrage can be discerned both in the unaccustomed (for him) rapidity (19 days) in which he replied and in the unconcealed contempt of his tone. ‘Others might speak to you in the submissive tone imposed by their dynastic fervour or their ambitions as courtiers; but I, when I write to you, can do so only as the Head of State of the Spanish nation addressing the Pretender to the throne.’ He went on, condescendingly, to attribute Don Juan’s position to his ignorance and to lay before him a petulant list of what he regarded as his own achievements.46
In the wake of Allied success in expelling Axis forces from North Africa in June 1943, Don Juan remained on the offensive. He could draw confidence from the fact that monarchists within the regime were beginning to fear for their own futures. At the end of the month, a group of 27 senior Procuradores (parliamentary deputies) from Franco’s pseudo-parliament, the Cortes, appealed to the Caudillo to settle the constitutional question by re-establishing the traditional Spanish Catholic monarchy before the War ended in an inevitable Allied victory. They believed that only the monarchy could avoid Allied retribution for Franco’s pro-Axis stance throughout the War. The signatories came from right across the Francoist spectrum, with representatives from the banks, the Armed Forces, monarchists and even Falangists. The Caudillo reacted swiftly. Even before the manifesto was published, he had ordered the arrest of the Marqués de la Eliseda who was collecting the signatures. As soon as it was published, showing how very little he was interested in his much-vaunted contraste de pareceres (contrast of opinions – his substitute for democratic politics), he dismissed all the signatories from their seats in the Cortes immediately and sacked the five of them who were also members of the Movimiento’s supreme consultative body, the Consejo Nacional.47
The Caudillo’s sense of being under siege by Don Juan was intensified by the fall of Mussolini on 25 July 1943. Don Juan sent Franco a telegram recommending the restoration of the monarchy as his only chance to avoid the fate of the Duce. It embittered even further the tension between the two. Thereafter, Don Juan believed that Franco never forgave him: ‘he always had it in for me after that telegram.’ It was a bizarre measure of Franco’s self-regard that he regarded Don Juan’s action as high treason.48 Mortified, but aware of his own vulnerability, he shelved his resentment for a better moment. Instead, Franco replied with an appeal to Don Juan’s patriotism, begging him not to make any public statement that might weaken the regime.49 The Caudillo had every reason to be worried – his senior generals were swinging more openly behind the cause of Don Juan. Pedro Sainz Rodríguez was informed that a number of them were ready to rise to restore the monarchy, provided that immediate Allied recognition could be arranged by Don Juan. The Caudillo’s anxiety – and his resentment of Don Juan – was exacerbated when he discovered in the late summer that the generals were conspiring. Prompted by Don Juan’s senior representative in Spain, his cousin Prince Alfonso de Orleans Borbón, they met in Seville on