It was October or November 2020, he does not remember it exactly. But the world was plunged into the coronavirus pandemic. Laurence Debray (Paris, 49 years old) had gone that afternoon to the apartment of one of her friends who gave to the pantheon, an imposing building in the center of Paris where “the great French heroes are buried,” he says with an indisputable Gallic pride. His mobile phone rang. “I replied and was King Juan Carlos,” he explained during an interview with El País last Wednesday at a hotel in Madrid. Two or three months ago, King Emeritus had self -exiled in Abu Dabi (United Arab Emirates, EAU), thus putting land in between his personal and financial problems. “I wanted to thank me for an article that I published in The world and in Le Figaro supporting him in order for the Spaniards to remember everything that (Juan Carlos) had done for Spain despite the last scandals, ”acknowledges Debray, an expert in the Spanish transition and great admirer of the figure -“ Politics ”, says the author – of Juan Carlos I. With that call, the emeritus king asked him to go to Abu Dabi to visit him to advance in a project that was around him in his head. That Planet will publish on November 12, ten days before the 50th anniversary of the parliamentary monarchy in Spain.
From then on, Debray spent a couple of years visiting King Emeritus in his new Emirati residence where, says the author, she is “very alone.” They talked, sometimes they argued and laughed. During his visits, the one who was head of state for 40 years was sliding the idea of writing his memoirs and was seduced for the project. The author had already written about him before. “I did not see myself trained for that project,” the writer repeatedly confesses while drinking with a discreet elegance a jasmine tea. He insisted and finally in September 2022, Debray moved with her family (her husband, Emile Servan-Schreiber, and two children of 14 and 12 years) to Abu Dhabi to begin one of the most anticipated memories of the last five years in Spain, and surely in other countries of Europe and Latin America, where King Emeritus has left a mark. “Writing the book in the first person was something unprecedented for me, but I was magnificent that he could tell his truth,” he explains about chapters of which King Emeritus has not pronounced. One of them is the coup d’etat of February 23, 1981 and the role played by the king himself.
Debray is very good to advance any hint of the content of Reconciliationa title that took to arrive and that was the result of a collective work. And ensures that, although the book may not reveal anything new, it does have an added value, not only by 23-F, but also for its version of its relationship with the Gulf monarchies. “It is he who tells and remembers everything (…). (In Spain) he has forgotten that Juan Carlos is one of the great European heroes of the twentieth century that is still alive,” he says with an admiration, emotion and interest that is reflected in his gaze.
The author, who has recently transferred her residence to Madrid so that her children perfect the Spanish – and for fear of the advance of anti -Semitism and the extreme right in France, she asks to add her – assures that she has not received any type of pressure or coercion from anyone, either from the king’s house, when writing the memories of Juan Carlos I.
He does regret, however, that King Emeritus had no access to his personal archive because “he is in the zarzuela,” he explains without going into details. Before the repeated opposition of the King’s house – until February 2024 with Jaime Alfonsín as his boss and then with Camilo Villarino – King Juan Carlos had to find shortcuts and pull family, friends and other contacts of the time to document and refresh his memory. “For me it was a disappointment (not having your personal archives). I even planned to have access to her father’s archives (Don Juan). I started working with that illusion,” says Debray.
But in the end the writer had her material that, together with “unpublished” photographs, completes the book. “It was the king who organized the calls, the logistics to talk to each other. “I already had enough to write,” he sighs with some arrogance, an attitude that she herself recognizes.
The writing process has been complex, he explains, because it is a book of many pages – which still cuts alongside the planet editorial – made to four hands, and in the first person. “In the end you don’t know what part is from whom,” he jokes. “I spent a lot of time with the king and this was an honor,” he repeats.
Debray moved from his house to that of the emeritus intermittently. “One day we talked and the next day he wrote. Then he read, corrected and commented. “(Juan Carlos) is a very serious, compromised, detailed, precise and worker person,” he says to criticize the image of Campechano that citizens in Spain of King Emeritus have. “It can also be, because one does not prevent the other,” he ends up clarifying.
As in any intense relationship, there were also anger. Debray remembers how King Juan Carlos bothered her on account of her son, King Felipe VI. “He is his first fan (…) and it is exciting to see him how he supports him and wants all his success,” says the writer. To such an extent, it is so, that King Emeritus once was bothered with Debray because he did not understand the excessive pride of Juan Carlos because of Felipe’s education, with a university career, a master’s degree in Georgetown, and so on. “As a little arrogant French I said: ‘Well, it is not that he was (Felipe) to the École Normale Supérieure”, in reference to a study center of the intellectual elite. “He got angry with me. He touched his father’s pride,” he acknowledges to add that every morning Juan Carlos I reads all Spanish newspapers and comments on his son’s performance as king, something that value positively. On a personal level, however, Juan Carlos is “hurt” by that loneliness.
Debray tries to remember some anecdote with Juan Carlos I. “He really liked to tell all his childhood in detail, the relationship with his parents, with his grandmother Victoria Eugenia…”, he reveals. The book tells the story of a Juan Carlos that is born in Rome (Italy), who grows in Switzerland and Portugal in exile, who stars the transition to democracy in Spain and to which the personal, financial and judicial scandals in his last years are surrounded.
“Everything is told,” says Debray. From his childhood to the beginning of 2023, when his major grandson, Felipe, known among the Spanish public as Froilán, something that Debray did not know and that confesses is very funny in Abu Dhabi. So, in Reconciliation There will be not Juan Carlos’s opinion about the last personal scandals – of which Debray says to shy away – like the audios of Barbara Rey who leaked his son, Ángel Christ, or the complaints of his examination Corinna Larsen and the former president of Cantabria Miguel Ángel Revilla.
The book, illustrated on the cover with an archive image of Juan Carlos I dressed as king of Spain, is in the last phase of layout and translation into Spanish – since the original is in French, a language in which Debray and King Emeritus have been related from the first day – will see the light of the hand of the planet editorial on November 12. Only ten days before the current headquarters of the State commemorate the 50 years of the parliamentary monarchy in Spain, an ephemeris that brings head to the gear of the zarzuela for the delicate lace of the figure of Juan Carlos I in the phases, of which the details have not yet transcended. Given the controversial date, however, Debray warns: “It has not been stipulated so that it is lied. It is not written from that perspective.”
In fact, the mood with which the book and the message that King Emeritus wants to move through Debray has been written is that “the Spaniards be reconciled with their history”, repeats up to three times. The history of Spain has all the elements, believes Debray, to proudly tell it. “A Frenchman would presume and giving lessons all over the world,” he exclaims in reference to the change that Spain has experienced from the 80s to today. “I hope this book contributes to the gaze of the Spaniards and recognize the political and institutional figure of the Emeritus King,” closes Debray.