Juan Carlos I

There are two central mysteries in the life of Juan Carlos de Borbón: one personal and the other political, both closely intertwined. The first is a consequence of his father handing over the child and later an adolescent tied hand and foot to the Franco regime. In a normal family, this act of near-child trafficking would have been considered appalling cruelty. But a royal family is not "normal", and the decision to send Juan Carlos to Spain responded to a "superior" dynastic logic. In fact, in this book the author explores how this experience caused young Juan Carlos a feeling of family abandonment that could have been the seed of the desire for sexual and financial conquests that led to his decline.The second mystery is how a prince from a family with authoritarian traditions, forced to act within Francoist "rules" and educated to be the cornerstone of a complex plan for the continuation of the dictatorship, ended up firmly committed to democracy. . Paul Preston, one of the historians who has shed the most light on the history of Spain in the 20th century, has updated once again, as a result of the latest events, his great work on King Juan Carlos, in which he addresses the conflictive relations of this with his father, his education aimed at perpetuating the Franco regime, his commitment to democracy and his actions against the coup that made him a national hero. In this volume, he examines in depth his role in the convulsive Spanish transition culminated in the military coup of 23-F and the evolution of his life since then, explaining how this national hero has ended up being vilified and forced into exile. The result is a book as accessible as it is rigorous, written in vibrant prose that offers us a human and political portrait of the man who could win, and then lose, the title of "King of all Spaniards."