Review by Michael Eaude
Downfall of a King reuses material from the author’s 2003 political biography of King Juan Carlos of Spain and updates it. In the years since, torrents of water have flowed under the bridge and Preston has nuanced his formerly excessive praise for the now ex-king. Nevertheless, Downfall continues to argue that Juan Carlos was the key player in bringing democracy to Spain in the 1970s and early ’80s. What is new is the spectacular collapse of Juan Carlos’ reputation in the past dozen years. From being “A people’s king” (the sub-title of Preston’s earlier biography) he has become an outcast living in gilded exile in Abu Dhabi. His multiple sexual affairs and shady financial dealings destroyed the reputation he and the royal household had constructed in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Queen Elizabeth’s son Andrew comes to mind, though Juan Carlos had to negotiate far more complex political and personal circumstances. Officially, the ex-king’s choice of residence is voluntary, though Preston makes clear that in reality it is ‘forced’. The present king Felipe wants to keep his disreputable old rake of a father as far away as possible.
To recapitulate, Spain’s Second Republic was declared on April 14 1931, despatching to exile King Alfonso XIII and his family. Alfonso’s grandson Juan Carlos was born in Rome in 1938. His father Don Juan, then the heir to the Spanish throne, attempted to join General Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). He argued that he was an experienced naval officer, having served in the British navy, but Franco cannily rejected Don Juan’s offer. During the decades of his brutal military dictatorship (1939- 1975), Franco played Don Juan like a master-fisherman with a marlin on the line, asserting that his dictatorship was a ‘monarchy without a monarch’. Don Juan, living in powerless exile in Estoril, redefined himself as a liberal democrat toward the end of World War Two, thinking as many did that Franco would fall like Mussolini and Hitler. No such luck. In 1949, accepting Franco’s permanence, he sent Juan Carlos to be educated in Spain by a series of fascists under Franco’s control. As Preston asserts, it was an action of great cruelty (‘his father… effectively sold him into slavery’). Don Juan placed the Bourbons’ ambition to recapture the throne, which entailed not breaking with Franco, over and above his son’s personal happiness. For the next 25 years Juan Carlos had to be loyal to Franco’s dictatorship in order to win the prize, the throne, at the end of the road. His nomination as Franco’s heir in 1969 was a victory earned by years of obedience to the dictator. It was also a betrayal of his father, relegated from his position as rightful monarch. Juan Carlos understood correctly that Franco would never nominate Don Juan as his heir. On becoming king when Franco died in November 1975, he embarked on a process of democratisation, thereby also betraying his previous personal and public promises that he would continue the Franco regime. This promotion and defence of democracy reached a climax on February 23/24 1981, when Juan Carlos achieved huge popularity by facing down Tejero’s military coup.
Juan Carlos has shown vividly two contrasting sides to his personality: amiable, glad-handing, with a smile on his face and a word for everyone; on the other hand, melancholy. The latter is hardly surprising, given his separation from his family, the teenage shooting accident in which he killed his brother and the impossible tensions of being for decades torn between Franco and Don Juan.
After 1981, no longer with a role to play in consolidating the new democracy, he could withdraw from front-line political interventions. He devoted himself to a number of risky business deals with shady financiers, several of whom went to jail (Mario Conde, Javier de la Rosa…), and to pocketing commissions on the lucrative business deals he attained for Spanish companies. His leisure activities involved big-game hunting all round the world and obsessive pursuit of women for sex. He had several long-term girl-friends, often overlapping, and constant one-night stands. Thousands of women were content to sleep with the prince, and then king. If not content, they had little option – an aspect Preston doesn’t enter into.
The Spanish media were pressured to conceal these activities. Many of the ruling class who owned these media were doubtless sympathetic to the king: why, a man seducing women is a real man and someone doing business for his country is entitled to a few perks. To know what Juan Carlos was up to in the 1990s, you had to read Italian and French scandal sheets. If you attacked the king within Spain, as the Basque leader Arnaldo Otegi did in 2003, saying ‘Juan Carlos imposes his monarchical regime on our people by means of torture and violence’, you ended up in jail. The wall of silence began to crack in the 2000s, shattering in 2012 when the king on luxury safari in Botswana with businesswoman, social climber and long-time lover Corinna Larsen fell and broke his hip.
It was a time of government-imposed austerity that threw many out of a job, froze wages and caused numerous evictions. The king’s financial shenanigans and sexual frolics began to be more closely scrutinised and less tolerated. It was revealed that a lover, the actress Bárbara Rey, had blackmailed him with explicit photos–and the state paid up. He had accounts in Switzerland and Jersey. He didn’t pay taxes. His reputation collapsed. While in 1975-1981 Juan Carlos acted decisively to conserve the monarchy, in 2014 his son acted again to conserve it, this time by obliging his father to abdicate.
Paul Preston is a great historian and an elegant writer. His knowledge of the Spanish Civil War is unmatched. He has also written a huge biography of Franco and a lot on the 1970s Transition from dictatorship to democracy. His case in this book and elsewhere is that Juan Carlos risked all in the Transition to bring democracy to Spain. Undoubtedly, he had to manoeuvre through clear threats of military coups and real conspiracies against the dismantling of the dictatorship. Yet I disagree with Preston’s emphases. The working-class activists who had mobilised so massively against Franco could have won more in the Transition. Preston sees the Communist Party’s move to the right, to support Juan Carlos’ role in the Transition, as acting responsibly. In reality, the Communist Party’s abandonment of its line of a clear break with the dictatorship was a betrayal of working-class aspirations.
What Juan Carlos and his advisers understood was that, if he did not want to lose his throne as his brother- in-law Constantine of Greece had, he had to support a democracy. In addition, Spain’s ruling class wanted to enter the European Union and abandon the underdevelopment caused by the dictatorship. He opted for the democracy. Whether he and his father truly were democrats, as Preston alleges, is doubtful – can an unelected monarch be a democrat? Similarly, on February 23 1981, when Juan Carlos as military commander-in-chief, ordered the generals not to support the coup, he clearly supported the democracy, a stance that sealed his popularity. However, in the preceding months of killings by the Basque terrorist group ETA and disintegration of the government, Juan Carlos had been irresponsibly ambiguous, like many politicians talking of the need for a ‘touch on the tiller’, i.e. a ‘soft coup’ like de Gaulle’s in 1958 to create a government of national unity.
What I find unconvincing in Preston’s account is the explanation of Juan Carlos’ later behaviour in his loveless childhood. Like most royals, Don Juan and Juan Carlos’ mother spent their time hosting and attending dinner parties and dances. Princes are brought up by nannies, not by parents. But Preston speculates on ‘..the inner emptiness that would explain so much of his existence in the years after 1982’ and argues that ‘Both a childhood of constant moves from one country to another and an adolescence of prolonged separation from friends and family may help explain the relentless quest for consolation in sexual adventures and financial enrichment from the 1980s onwards’. There are numerous similar passages throughout the book: this psychological explanation is the book’s uniting theme. ‘Consolation’ is a strange word: obsessive sex with as many women as possible is an exercise of power. In actuality, Juan Carlos was merely following what monarchs traditionally do, including his grandfather Alfonso XIII, who was involved in many a financial scandal, as Preston explains in his magnificent A People Betrayed (2019) on the corruption of Spain’s ruling class. Sexual domination and exploitation of women are normal characteristics of kings. In both sex and money, Juan Carlos was following tradition.
Is Juan Carlos’ downfall a tragedy? Has this doddery old man, once so dominant and popular, and now fallen low, become a tragic figure like King Lear? No. It is merely that kings who could in the past do just what they liked with women and money find in the present epoch of immediate information that more people are looking at them. In old age in his luxury mansion in Abu Dhabi, paid for by wealthy acolytes, he may cut a pitiable figure, but his exile is not undeserved. In his recent ghost-written memoirs, melancholy spills into self-pity as he moans that his achievements are not sufficiently recognised and that his wife Sofia doesn’t visit him. Hardly surprising, when 50 years ago she and their three children discovered him in bed with a starlet of the time.
Michael Eaude has lived between Barcelona and the hills of Valencia for thirty years. He is the author of several books including Catalonia: A Cultural History and Triumph at Midnight in the Century: A Critical Biography of Arturo Barea. He has written for the Guardian, Literary Review and Socialist Review. His website can be found here: www.michaeleaude.com.
Paul Preston, Downfall of a King (William Collins, 2026). 978-0008741105, 544pp., hardback.
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