The Ancien Regime 2
Life in 21st Century Spain (though you wouldn't know it)
| Not a man, but Isabella II, booted off in 1870 |
| King's grandad rakish Alfonso XIII, booted off in 1931 |
2) The House of Bourbon - last, best hope of Counter-reformation Europe
It helps to remember that King Juan Carlos de Borbón is not an ordinary monarch of an ordinary country. Firstly, by conservative Catholic standards, he is a supermonarch. All the residual hereditary glories of the old Catholic Bourbon house (booted off the throne of
So it is that King Juan Carlos presently goes by the following resounding titles –
“King of Spain, of Castile,
of León, of Aragon,
of the Two Sicilies (Naples and Sicily),
of Jerusalem,
of Navarre,
of Granada,
of Toledo, of Valencia,
of Galicia,
of Majorca,
of Seville,
of Sardinia,
of Córdoba,
of Corsica,
of Murcia, of Menorca, of Jaén,
of Algeciras,
of the Canary Islands,
of the East and West Indies and of
the Islands and Mainland of the Ocean Sea; Archduke of Austria;
Duke of Burgundy,
of Brabant, of Milan, and of Neopatra (New
Patras); Count of Habsburg, of Flanders,
of Tyrol, of Roussillon and
of Barcelona;
Lord of Biscay and
of Lord of Molina.”
Thus the king’s official titular claims extend way beyond what can be legitimately claimed as sovereign of Spain, to include bits of France, Italy, Greece, Austria, Belgium, Israel/Palestine, the Philippines, the Caribbean and whatever “the Ocean Sea” can be interpreted to mean.
A few sarcastic comments about this mishmash of titles occur immediately:
King of the Islands and Mainland of theOcean Sea
I am… King of theOcean
Seas
From the West to theEastern Indies
And all on the Ocean will please
the King of there,
who’s………Meeeee!
King of theWest Indies ? I believe Bob Marley
had a different monarch in mind for those islands – Hailie Salassie I, Emperor
of Ethiopia. But Bob’s dead, and so is the Emperor.
King ofJerusalem Israel nor the Palestinians will have any
problem if you take over sovereign authority of Jerusalem
Archduke ofAustria Sarajevo
Count ofFlanders ? So if Flanders ever becomes
independent from Belgium
Count of Rousillon? Gosh, sire, it’s almost like you never heard of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, in whichSpain
relinquished all claim to territory over the mountains in France
Duke ofMilan
And so on. It’s easy to scoff at this unhistorical heraldic guff that somehow got mixed up with the issue of the legitimacy of the throne ofSpain
Thus the king’s official titular claims extend way beyond what can be legitimately claimed as sovereign of Spain, to include bits of France, Italy, Greece, Austria, Belgium, Israel/Palestine, the Philippines, the Caribbean and whatever “the Ocean Sea” can be interpreted to mean.
A few sarcastic comments about this mishmash of titles occur immediately:
King of the Islands and Mainland of the
I am… King of the
From the West to the
And all on the Ocean will please
the King of there,
who’s………Meeeee!
King of the
King of
Archduke of
Count of
Count of Rousillon? Gosh, sire, it’s almost like you never heard of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, in which
Duke of
And so on. It’s easy to scoff at this unhistorical heraldic guff that somehow got mixed up with the issue of the legitimacy of the throne of
Don't look at the pedigree, check out the track record
For the last recognised government of
And of course his fund of popular goodwill rests on what happened soon after that: when a militaristic right-wing putsch broke out on 23 February 1981, the king ordered all rebellious forces to stand down and thus thwarted the coup attempt. Parliamentary democracy was consolidated, the Transition went ahead.
So beyond the clownish titles claimed as chief Bourbon by Juan Carlos, and beyond his dodgy credentials as to historical legitimacy as head of state, his record has two great plus signs for the great majority of the Spanish public: he was voted in as head of state in 1978 as part of the new Spanish state constitution, and he defended that nascent democracy with a brave personal gesture just over two years later.
I’d like to go on in the next section with a portrait of head of state King Juan Carlos, leader of the Spanish old guard, by examining some key moments in his life.
This will naturally include the creation of the Constitution of 1978 around him as head of state. What was created in 1978 became known much later as the “Almost Untouchable” constitution (“la casi intocable”), and for a time the King too became “almost untouchable” as the state’s personification. During the last decades of the twentieth century, he was the agreeable glue holding the Spanish state together.
However, the King then went on to lose that aura of ceremonial untouchability in the 21st century. Cracks began to appear in the perfect gleaming Euro-democracy edifice of the Transition, which now started resembling a crumbling facade in an old middle-European town featuring the ancient, weathered statue of a forgotten Archduke of Austria.
Sources
Titles claimed by King
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Carlos_I_of_Spain
Treaty of the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_the_Pyrenees
23-F 1981 attempted coup
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23-F
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