Description - Juan Carlos by Paul Preston
A powerful biography of Spain's great king, Juan Carlos. How did a playful, moody young prince, educated to sustain Franco's dicatorship, mature into the skilful, calm and brave king who defended Spain's infant democracy from siege and then nurtured it into health? It's a fascinating story, given definitively here in this gripping portrait. There are two central mysteries in the life of Juan Carlos, one personal, the other political. How to explain the apparent serenity with which he accepted that his father had surrendered him, to all intents and purposes, into the safekeeping of the Franco regime? In any normal family, this would have been considered a kind of cruelty or, at the very least, baleful negligence. But a royal family can never be normal, and the decision to send the young Juan Carlos away from Spain was governed by a certain 'superior' dynastic logic. The second mystery lies in how a prince raised in a family with the strictest authoritarian tradtiions, obliged to conform to the Francoist norms during his youth and early manhood, and educated to be a cornerstone of the plans for the reinforcement of the dictatorship, sided, when he had to, so emphatically and courageo
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