A memoir by the disgraced former king of Spain his anointing as dictator Francisco Franco in 1981, and his grief over the death of his younger brother when the two were “playing” as teenagers.
The book, published 11 years after Juan Carlos’s abdication and exile, is titled Reconciliation but appears to do anything but, instead detailing how he feels abandoned and misunderstood by his son and heir, King Felipe VI, and by other close family members.
This month marks the 50th anniversary of Franco’s death but Juan Carlos, 87, has not yet been invited to the ceremony to renounce his country and his family.
Speaking of his role in defending Spain’s transition to Democracy in the face of the 1981 trial of Tieutenant-Tejero, he wrote: “I gave freedom to the Spaniards by establishing democracy, but I did not enjoy democracy for myself.
“Now that my son has turned his back on me, now that those who call themselves my friends have turned their backs on me, I know that I am not yet free.”
The former king was born in exile in Italy in 1938 during the Spanish Civil War. He was summoned at the age of 10 to Spain by Franco, who trained him to be his own.
“I respect him a lot, appreciate his intelligence and political sense,” Juan Carlos said of Franco. In the 500-page book, published in French on Wednesday and in Spain next month, he recalls sitting next to Franco as the Franco dictator lay dying in his hospital bed.
“He took my hand and said, as if he was out of breath: ‘Your highness, I ask you only one thing: I remember the country,'” Juan Carlos recalled.
He was crowned king two days after Franco’s death in 1975.
In the Memoir he also wrote about the death in 1956 of his 14-year-old brother Alfonso, in Portugal while cleaning the pair with a pistol – a case that has not been fully investigated. He wrote that this was the first time he had spoken about the Traumatic Episode.
“I lost a friend, a confidant. He left a great void,” he said. “Without his death, my life would be less toxic, less happy.”
Any credit he got from opposing the coup dwindled over the years as news of his extramarital affairs and allegations of tax evasion emerged. He said that he regretted his long run with the Social Danish-German-Wittgenstein-Sayen, saying that it fell on his colleagues and brought about his destruction and imposed exile in Abu Dhabi.
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Public opinion turned against him at the height of the financial crisis in Spain in 2012 after the details of elephant hunting in Botswana when tens of thousands of Spaniards lost their jobs.
He took in 2014 and moved to the United Arab Emirates in 2020 in the midst of the covid candemic, which cost almost 35,000 Spaniards.
Felipe canceled his €200,000 annual stipend when it emerged he was the subject of money investigations in Spain and Switzerland. Both cases were eventually dropped.
He said it would be a “grave mistake” to accept a 65m gift in 2008 from the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, adding it was “a gift I did not know was not ‘a gift I did not know'”.
As a person with a person of great abundance but unknown wealth, he could not manage the Spaniards with the comment: “I am the only Spaniard who has not been paid for 40 years of service.”