Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not quite a masterpiece . . ., August 2, 2004
This review is from: Juan Carlos: Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy (Hardcover)
Other reviews of Professor Preston's biography of the King of Spain describe it as a masterpiece. For all its virtues, I am reluctant to go that far.
No-one seeing the emotional pictures of the King and Queen of Spain and their family visiting the injured and bereaved in the wake of the bombing atrocities in Madrid on the 11th March can be in any doubt about the position and role of the Bourbon monarchy in contemporary Spain. Of all the European monarchs today, Juan Carlos I of Spain enjoys the greatest stature, primarily for his role in the nurturing and development of democracy in the wake of the decades of dictatorship under General Franco. The road to his coronation as King of Spain in 1975 was a long one and a hard one, indeed a dangerous road. From 1948 the two decades under the watchful and omnipresent eye of the Caudillo, the years of monarch-in-waiting after designation as Franco's successor, and as king after Franco's death, until the mid-1980s, were fraught with uncertainty, loneliness, political tension and intrigue, threats of military intervention, and, in 1981, a somewhat farcical but potentially deadly attempted coup by army officers who longed to return the country to the old days of the Caudillo. Professor Preston relates this history of Juan Carlos's youth, apprenticeship to Franco and succession to the throne with painstaking, sometimes numbing detail, all supported by a wealth of footnotes pointing to original sources. But it is very much a political, academic biography.
Where Preston excels is in the elaboration of the intrigues of the Franco "court" in the years from 1948 to the Caudillo's death in 1975, and the thorny path, politically and morally, that Juan Carlos had to tread to ensure that the Bourbon monarchy would be restored on Franco's death. He had to contend not just with what Preston calls the Francoist "bunker" of hard-line Falangists and conservatives, but also his father, Prince Juan de Bourbon, Count of Barcelona, son of King Alfonso XIII (who had abdicated before the outbreak of the civil war). Juan de Bourbon firmly believed that he should be the king, despite the fact that it was long obvious that he was totally unacceptable to Franco; Juan Carlos's position as Franco's putative successor placed him an inextricably uncomfortable relationship with his father Prince Juan. Equally, Preston explores in great detail the jockeying and intrigue, the terrorism and the military plotting and unrest that followed the death of Franco, up to and including the failed coup of 1981. It is an impressive accomplishment.
Why, then, do I qualify my praise of Professor Preston's book? First, I approached the book as a general interest reader, not as an academic, and as such I found the extraordinary detail that attends the telling of some episodes too much: politicians, ministers, and especially military officers come and go at a bewildering rate, many never to be heard of again. In this, the reader's comprehension is not helped by Professor Preston's somewhat loose treatment of personal pronouns in the text: all too often one is left wondering who is the "he" or "him" referred to. Elegant prose is not Preston's forte.
A parallel point: there is, as one would expect, much discussion of the House of Bourbon, but either Professor Preston or the publishers decided not to include a family tree. This would have been most helpful in working out why there were several potential candidates for the throne. Moreover, a footnote explaining who the "Carlists" were and why they maintained a claim to the throne (stemming from episodes in 19th Century Spain) would have clarified the significance of demonstrations against Juan Carlos by "Carlist" supporters.
What I found most surprising, however, and what I think is a major shortcoming of the book, is that there is little personal detail about Juan Carlos's life outside the "official" or "political". While at the end one has been led through a veritable jungle of Spanish post-civil war and post-Franco politicking, one knows very little indeed about Juan Carlos (except for his relations with his father) as a man, rather than as a prince or monarch. For example, after more than 400 pages of text, one is suddenly surprised to be told, in little more than a paragraph, that Queen Sophia had contemplated divorce in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Preston provides no preparation for this statement, and almost no analysis of it. Indeed, while Sophia is a critically important figure in the Spanish monarchy, and hugely popular today, there is no discussion of her contribution, her personality, or her relationship with the king, other than her encouragement of Juan Carlos to do whatever was necessary in the years before 1975 to ensure the restoration of the monarchy. Surely we can expect a major biography of the king to provide this sort of personal background, and to throw some light on the reasons why the royal marriage almost went the way of so many of their Windsor cousins. It leaves me with the slightly uncomfortable feeling that maybe Professor Preston is a little too keen to please.
Finally, having painstakingly worked his way in 500 pages from 1938 to 1981, Preston gallops through the last 20 years in a matter of 30 pages, with a cursory mention of the 14-year premiership of Felipe Gonzales and nothing at all of that of Jose Maria Aznar.
While I have been critical of some aspects of this book, I readily admire its scholarship and its dedication to its subject. It is hard to imagine this biography being bettered in the foreseeable future, but it is a pity that Professor Preston did not make it even better himself.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A very different kind of royal biography, September 6, 2004
This review is from: Juan Carlos: Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy (Hardcover)
Fans of the usual kinds of biographies about kings and princes should be careful about this one. It's a very good book, but it's likely to be very far from the sort of thing you're expecting. But then, King Juan Carlos of Spain's life has been very different from that of most modern royals. In a sense, this book is hardly even "about" him at all. Rather, it's an in-depth look at a transitional era in Spanish history, as well as at the man who, in many ways, was the pivot on which that transition turned. People looking for that kind of book will be rewarded here.
Let me expand a little on what this book isn't, because I think that's important. There's not really very much in these pages about Juan Carlos' life outside the political realm. For example, the author mentions in passing toward the end of the book the king's "obsession with speed and with expensive sports in which he risked his life and which frequently caused him serious accidents and injuries" (p. 511). In most royal biographies, those kinds of things would be central to the story. Here, they're barely an aside. Likewise, Queen Sophia hardly appears here except tangentially in a political context. The Infantas and Prince Felipe show up even less. Is this book a well-rounded look at Juan Carlos as a man? No.
But then, it doesn't seem like it's intended to be. What this book is, as I said, is a look at the king's role in helping Spain move from the Francoist dictatorship to the current popular democracy. That role was a central one -- not only at key moments like dismantling the 1981 coup attempt, but also in slowly, quietly, and yet unrelentingly keeping in check the forces that wanted to maintain Francoism even after the Caudillo's death in 1975.
In telling this story, Paul Preston has produced a well-researched and well-sourced book that at times is almost overwhelming with its depth and detail. This is a book thick with names, dates, meetings, quotations ... I frankly found it slow going at times. Around page 300, I found myself asking (as I'm sure the people of Spain asked at the time), "Isn't Franco dead YET?!" Preston's discussion of the controversy about legalizing the Communist Party of Spain similarly seemed to go on for a really long time. And how many times did he need to repeat that the adolescent Juan Carlos' wishes were not consulted in the high-level negotiations between his father and Franco over how he was to be educated?
A bit of familiarity with Spanish history and government would be useful to the reader too. Perhaps Preston assumes his reader has already read his biography of Franco, since he's pretty thin on what exactly the Spanish Civil War was all about, why Alfonso XIII had to leave Spain, and what precisely the oft-mentioned principles of the *Movimiento* really were. Similarly, Preston is quick to throw out names, events, and acronyms without always taking the time to explain who or what they are, or why (or if) they matter.
Yet ultimately, all the depth, all the detail, all the exhaustive documentation has produced a volume that may be, at least in English, the definitive look at King Juan Carlos and his role in the restoration of Spain's monarchy and democracy. Preston emphasizes the weight of the king's personal sacrifice throughout his life in order to put Spain back on a solid democratic footing, and the truly central role he did (and does) play in that process. As he notes on page 474, for example, if the king had chosen to support the 1981 coup, there's no question it would have succeeded. That he chose not to support it doomed it to failure.
The world of royal biography -- especially biography of still-living or recently-deceased figures -- is filled with shallow puffery and fawning adulation. When something different comes along, fans of royalty as well as serious historians should snap it up. This volume definitely falls into that category -- not only for its value as a work of history, but also as proof of how monarchy can and ought to be a force for good, even in an era which has tended to turn its back on that form of government. As a noted political commentator wrote following the collapse of the 1981 coup attempt (quoted on page 488), "Whilst we Spaniards thought that we deserved something better than a king, it turns out that we have a king that we don't deserve."
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Good King, September 25, 2004
This review is from: Juan Carlos: Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy (Hardcover)
Royalty demands sycophancy from its subjects, and this is especially the case for royal biography. Notwithstanding that it doesn't take too much for people to realize that most monarchs are deeply unattractive people. Whether it is the selfish, irresponsible house of Savoy so acutely delineated in Denis Mack Smith's Italy and its Monarchy, or the houses of Hohenzollern and Romanov leading their countries to disaster, or the fundamentally mediocre British monarchy as seen in the essays of David Cannadine, or for that matter Juan Carlos' irresponsible, shallow brother-in-law, Constantine II, the last king of Greece, monarchs are people who believe the rest of the world owes them a living.
In 1931 it seemed that the Spanish branch of the Bourbons had met its own well-deserved fate, as King Alfonso went into exile and his countrymen formed a democratic republic. As Preston puts it, the royal family does not take exile well. Hemophiliac uncles, morganatic marriages, adulterous affairs, a deaf and dumb uncle whose son will be used by Preston to make Juan Carlos' life even more miserable, it all looked most unpromising. One detail that comes to mind is a picture of a four year old Juan Carlos in military uniform. It was only after he had been standing in it for hours that people realized that his books were too small and his feet had been rubbed raw. But on the whole this is a picture of Juan Carlos that is fairly sympathetic to him. After he appears on the scene, there is little gossip of the Eurotrash aspect of things. (Although we do learn that Juan Carlos accidentally shot his brother to death.)
Juan Carlos, born in 1938, and his father Don Juan had to find a way to restore the monarchy after the Spanish Civil war. The problem was simple. Franco at the time made monarchist sentiments and many monarchists were among his followers. The problem was that he had no desire of sharing power with anyone, and himself had little respect for the previous monarchy which had tolerated a limited parliamentarianism. He suspected Don Juan might try to reconcille his divided country, and remove it from Franco's regime of divine vindictiveness. The problem for Don Juan, who spent most of Franco's reign living in Portugal, was that he had little to offer and little power to use it. Although much of the Francoist elite would have prefered to see a monarchy, they were not going to risk their power trying to force the issue. And so for until 1968 Don Juan waited, endured Franco's condescension and lies, occasionally got angry, was separated from his son for long periods of time at considerable psychological stress for both of them, and ended up doing what Franco wanted. Franco got the idea that Juan Carlos might be more ameneable to Francoist propaganda and so in 1948 he was sent to Spain and educated under Falangist tuetalage. Finally after two decades of toying with them, Franco made Juan Carlos, not his father, his heir apparent.
Juan Carlos' prospects were not promising. Being made heir was better than having to look over his shoulders at Carlist and other pretenders. But now he, although of generally liberal opinions, was stuck in a regime that was firmly reactionary. Franco had no desire to step down, and would remain in power almost until the very end. Consistently he and his entourage took the most reactionary path. Had his prime minister Carrero Blanco not been assassinated in 1973 by Basque separatists, the transition to democracy would have been much more difficult. And even when Franco grew less malevolent as old age, senility and death came upon him (the last a process that took months to complete) Juan Carlos still had to worry about the reactionary entourage of Franco's wife.
And then Preston discusses how Juan Carlos managed to ease out the more reactionary Francoists from the cabinet, got the more moderate Suarez to make a transition to power, and, most dramatic of all, stopped the coup of February 1981 by making his clear his unconditional oppostion to it. For this transition to democracy Juan Carlos is beloved by his subjects and the Spanish monarchy appears as stable as Britain, Scandinavia and the Benelux countries. There are some points I would like to mention here. For a start, although there is new detail, much of the storyline can be seen in Preston's earlier books "Franco" and "The Triumph of Spanish Democracy." Second, one should point out that Juan Carlos was assisted by the Spanish Socialist and Communist parties, who agreed to let Juan Carlos remain, instead of pointing out that he had no popular mandate to do so. Third, it does seem unfair that the Spanish monarchy should get the credit for Juan Carlos' bravery, since the same crisis is not likely to be repeated again, and the absence of republicanism in contemporary Spain appears less as an act of gratitude than the whole post-socialist failure of imagination.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
