Juan Carlos: Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy. Paul Preston
of the line that fell in 1931, but rather only the installation of a Falangist monarchy. However, the unexpected success of the monarchists in the Madrid ‘elections’ showed that the Falange was increasingly anachronistic while the monarchist option seemed more in tune with the outside world. The policies of autarchic self-sufficiency favoured by both Franco and the Falange had brought Spain to the verge of economic disaster. At the very least, it would be prudent to convince the royalists among his own supporters of his own good faith as a monarchist – hence the meeting. Don Juan and his supporters might believe that they would be discussing ways of hastening a restoration but Franco’s letter showed again that he would hand over power only on his death or total incapacity and then only to a king who was committed to the unconditional maintenance of the dictatorship.
It was clear that Franco saw the education of Juan Carlos as the preparation of precisely such a king. That did not necessarily mean that there was certainty as to the Prince’s eventual succession to the throne. Apart from encouraging the claim of Don Jaime and his sons, Franco now had another candidate nearer home. On 9 December, his first grandson had been born and his sycophantic son-in-law, Cristóbal Martínez-Bordiu, suggested changing the baby’s name by reversing his matronymic and patronymic. The formal agreement by a servile Cortes on 15 December to his name being Francisco Franco Martínez-Bordiu made the new arrival a potential heir to his grandfather. Alarm spread in monarchist circles that Franco planned to establish his own dynasty.54 This was exacerbated when the Conde de los Andes reported on the harshness of Franco’s tone during their negotiations on the agenda to be discussed in the forthcoming meeting between the Caudillo and Don Juan. Outlining his own plan for the Prince’s education, he had told the astonished count that: ‘If Don Juan does not accept such an education for his son, or his son does not agree to it, the Prince should not return to Spain and that will mean that he has renounced the throne and that I will consider myself free of any understanding with him.’ Pacón noted in his diary that a meeting was utterly pointless because he knew that nothing would make Franco deviate from the plan that he had laid out. He bluntly told Pacón, ‘If Don Juan wants his son ever to reign in Spain, he must submit to my wishes, which are for his own good and for that of the fatherland, by entrusting the boy’s education to me. It must be without interference from anyone and handed over only to people that I trust totally.’55
Don Juan set off for Spain by car on 28 December 1954. Franco left El Pardo at 8 a.m. on the next morning in a Cadillac and with a convoy of guards. Both were headed for a halfway point between Madrid and Lisbon – Navalmoral de la Mata in the province of Cáceres in Extremadura. Arriving in Spain that evening was an emotional moment for Don Juan, the first time that he had set foot in his homeland since his failed attempt to join the Nationalist forces in 1936. The meeting – at Las Cabezas, the estate of the Conde de Ruiseñada, Juan Claudio Güell, the Pretender’s new representative in Spain – lasted from 11.20 a.m. to 7.30 p.m. with a late lunch break. At the steps of the mansion, the ever-affable Don Juan greeted Franco cordially and had created a relaxed atmosphere by the time that they sat before a roaring fire. He felt confident, telling Franco that he had received thousands of messages of support from Spain including telegrams from four Lieutenant-Generals. However, such references to the current debate on the monarchist succession went over Franco’s head as relating to a far distant and theoretical future. This became clear when he began to talk of the possibility of separating the functions of Head of State and Head of Government. He would do so only, he said, when his health gave out, or he ‘disappeared’ or because the good of the regime, with the evolution of time, required it, ‘but, as long as I have good health, I don’t see any advantages in change’.
Franco was clearly at his ease, talking without pause or even a sip of water, and he proceeded to give Don Juan an interminable, rambling history lesson. Don Juan commented later that it was like listening to an obsessive grandfather boasting about his past. In fact, Franco’s reminiscences about his own military exploits could be seen as a sly attempt to humiliate Don Juan, who had not been allowed to fight in the Civil War. Efforts by Don Juan to get a word in edgeways and turn the discussion to the timing of the transition to the monarchy and the terms of the post-Franco future met with a frosty response. Franco did not hesitate to criticize many prominent monarchists as drunks and gamblers, accusing Pedro Sainz Rodríguez, about whom he had the most neurotic delusions, of being a freemason. When Don Juan praised Sainz Rodríguez as a faithful counsellor, in whom he had complete confidence, Franco replied, ‘I have never trusted anyone.’
Don Juan’s suggestion of the introduction of freedom of the press, an independent judiciary, social justice, trade union freedom and proper political representation merely reinforced Franco’s conviction that he was the puppet of dangerous aristocratic meddlers who were probably freemasons. Through the impenetrable and self-satisfied verbiage glimmered the Caudillo’s message. As he had already informed the Conde de los Andes: if Don Juan did not bow to his demand that Juan Carlos be educated under his tutelage, he would consider it as a renunciation of the throne. The needs, let alone the wishes, of Juan Carlos simply did not enter into the debate. Faced with Franco’s ultimatum, Don Juan thus agreed that his son be educated at the three military academies, at the university and at Franco’s side. However, he made it quite clear that none of this constituted a renunciation of his own rights. With the greatest reluctance, Franco accepted an anodyne joint communiqué whose terms implicitly, if not explicitly, recognized the hereditary rights to the throne of the Borbón dynasty. It was a minor victory for Don Juan that his name should appear alongside that of Franco.56
The joint communiqué aside, Franco had made no real concessions about a future restoration, or rather installation, as he called it. Nevertheless, the theatrical gesture of meeting Don Juan had, for the moment, drawn the sting of the monarchists and gave the impression that progress was being made. In his end of year message on 31 December 1954, he made it quite clear that he had conceded nothing to Don Juan. Using the royal ‘we’, he stressed that the monarchist forms enshrined in the Ley de Sucesión had nothing to do with the monarchy of Alfonso XIII. In the wake of the Las Cabezas meeting, the Caudillo was publicly affirming that he did not renounce his right, enshrined in the Ley de Sucesión, to choose a successor to guarantee the continuity of his authoritarian regime.57
Chatting with Pacón on the same day, Franco claimed that, at Las Cabezas, Don Juan had asked him if he thought it was necessary to abdicate in order that his son should have the right to inherit the throne. The exchange is not recorded in other accounts of the meeting. Indeed, those accounts suggest that what Don Juan actually said was that allowing his son to be educated in Spain did not constitute an abdication of his own rights. However, if it was not just wishful thinking on Franco’s part and Don Juan did ask the question, it could be interpreted as a ploy to force Franco to acknowledge the dynastic rights of the family. If, at Franco’s behest, Don Juan had abdicated in favour of his son, the Caudillo would have been committing himself to choosing Juan Carlos as his successor. It is unlikely that the question of abdication was raised in the precise terms recounted by Franco to his cousin. However the subject was raised, Franco’s reply, at least in his own account to Pacón, was a masterpiece of cunning.
Unwilling to reduce his options, the Caudillo allegedly replied, ‘I do not think that the problem of your abdication needs to be raised today, as we are here to discuss your son’s education, but since you’ve mentioned it, I must tell you that I believe that Your Highness rendered himself incompatible with today’s Spain, because against my advice that Your Highness remain silent and make no declarations, you published a manifesto in which you refused to collaborate with the regime and thus made yourself incompatible with it.’ He went on to talk of his ‘inclination’ to name as his successor a direct heir to Alfonso XIII. However, he also mentioned the strong temptation to nominate a prince from the Traditionalist branch of the family as a reward to the Carlists for their role in the Civil War and their loyalty thereafter. If the conversation took place as he claimed, it revealed his determination both to humiliate Don Juan and to keep open his own options.58
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