2023-07-18 05:45:00
March 29, 1956. The Spanish royal family, then in exile, attends the morning mass on Holy Thursday and receives Communion in the church of San Antonio, in Estoril (Portugal). After a light lunch, the Count of Barcelona and Juan Carlos accompany the Infante Alfonso to a competition at the Golf Club of the Portuguese city. Despite the bad weather, the 14-year-old, his father’s favorite son, wins the semifinal. The Bourbons return to their home, called Villa Giralda. At six in the evening they attend an evening mass and return home. A couple of hours later, at half past eight at night, the family doctor, Dr. Joaquín Abreu Loureiro, arrives in a hurry to treat Alfonsito. Loureiro certifies that the child died from a gunshot wound to the head. Apparently, Juanito, 18, and Alfonso, 14, were practicing their marksmanship with a small .22-caliber revolver in the first-floor game room when the gun went off. Nobody knows exactly what happened.
“The most absolute silence will surround the details of the fateful event: the scene of the drama remains a mystery and can only be the subject of hypotheses,” explains Laurence Debray, authorized biographer of the emeritus king, in his book Juan Carlos of Spain. The most current biography of the king (2014). There are up to five different versions of what happened that night. The British and Hispanic historian Paul Preston collects them in his book Juan Carlos, the king of a town (2003). On Friday, March 30, the dictator Francisco Franco ordered the Spanish embassy in Lisbon to issue the following statement: “While His Highness the Infante Alfonso was cleaning a revolver that night with his brother, a shot was fired that hit his forehead and killed him. in a few minutes. The accident occurred at 8:30 p.m., after the infant had returned from the religious service on Holy Thursday, during which he had received Holy Communion. The Italian press published a very different version, stating that Juan Carlos was holding the gun and that his finger was on the trigger when the fatal shot was fired. In her autobiography, the Countess of Barcelona neither denies nor confirms that Juanito was holding the pistol, but she does contradict the official account of Francoism. She would later reveal to her dressmaker, Josefina Carolo, that her eldest son jokingly took aim and, not realizing that the gun was loaded, pulled the trigger.
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The emeritus king told a version similar to that of his mother to a Portuguese friend, Bernardo Arnoso, but added a nuance. According to him, the bullet had bounced off a wall and hit his little brother’s face. The Infanta Pilar, sister of the monarch, would have told another story to the Greek writer Helena Matheopoulos: that Alfonsito had left the room to find something to eat for Juan Carlos and himself. Returning with his hands full, he shouldered the door open. The door hit his brother’s arm. Juan Carlos involuntarily pulled the trigger just as Alfonso’s head appeared through the door.
There are many variants of the same story, but all the testimonies agree on something: that the counts of Barcelona ran up to the playroom where the infant was in the middle of a pool of blood, that Don Juan tried to revive his son and that the child died in his arms. The Count of Barcelona covered the body with a Spanish flag and, according to Antonio Eraso, Alfonsito’s friend, turned to Juan Carlos and said: “Swear to me it wasn’t on purpose.”
For a few days there has been a new version, revealed by a member of European royalty. “I was there. We were in exile and we used to shoot jars and bottles on the beach in Cascais. Juanito made a big fuss of it. He shot his brother and killed him, ”recalls Prince Victor Emmanuel of Savoy, son of the last king of Italy, in the new documentary The Prince Who Never Reigned. “He did not shoot him directly, but through the closet. I was there. It was an accident. 100%, okay? I hid my gun, otherwise they would have said it was my fault. After that, he called him Franco. ‘Juanito, come immediately with me to Spain.’ Franco said: ‘I will make him king’, explains Saboya in the docuseries directed by Beatrice Borromeo Casiraghi, which has just premiered on Netflix.
In 1978, Víctor Manuel starred in a similar episode. He was charged with manslaughter and later, more than a decade later, acquitted. The prince, a childhood friend of the emeritus king, made part of his fortune by acting as an intermediary between Italian companies of war material and the last Shah of Persia. In 2004 he ended up punching Amadeo of Aosta, another pretender to the throne of Italy, at the wedding of Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. In 2006 he admitted to collecting and paying bribes to obtain gaming machine licenses around the casino in Campione d’Italia, an Italian enclave in Switzerland, although he was later acquitted.
The absence of a judicial investigation into the death of Alfonso de Borbón y Borbón has been generating all kinds of speculation for almost seven decades. The statements by Víctor Manuel de Saboya have only revived interest in the case. The infant was not autopsied. There were also no police proceedings to clarify the circumstances of his death. The boy was buried in the Cascais cemetery on March 31, 1956. After the ceremony, Juan de Borbón took the pistol that had killed his son and threw it into the sea. There were conflicting rumors about the origin of the weapon. According to some, it had been a gift from Franco to Alfonsito, although that would be unlikely because, as Paul Preston recounts in his book, the infante hated the dictator and referred to him as “the dwarf” or “the toad.” According to others, the pistol had been given to Juan Carlos at the Zaragoza Military Academy.
Don Juan at the funeral of his youngest son, Alfonso, in Cascais, on March 31, 1956. Behind him, his eldest son, Juan Carlos.Hulton Archive (Getty Images)
The event of that March 29 had dire consequences for the Bourbons. Less than 48 hours after the incident, the Count of Barcelona ordered his eldest son to return to Spain immediately. Juan Carlos I became a solitary and reclusive man, tormented by the death of his brother. It did not help that Franco allowed the Ministry of Education to approve the publication and use for high school of a textbook entitled La moral catholic, which used the incident to study the limits of personal guilt. The Countess of Barcelona fell into a depression and had to be admitted to a clinic. Her husband was weakened by his great rival, Franco. The dictator used the family tragedy to undermine the spirit of the claimant to the throne. When don Juan and Franco met in 1960, the latter justified keeping him away from Spain by saying that the Bourbon family was “miserable.”
In the end, Franco took advantage of Alfonsito’s death to put an end to don Juan’s claim to the throne. Juanito was, from that moment on, the only possible candidate to succeed the dictator, the only one capable of restoring the monarchy in Spain. As Rafael Borràs explains in his book El rey de los rojos (2005), the infant’s death “deprived the Count of Barcelona, from the point of view of dynastic legitimism, of a hypothetical substitute in the event that the Prince of Asturias accepted to be the successor of General Franco, against the paternal will, in accordance with the Law of Succession and outside the ‘normal’ line of succession. As Paul Preston points out in his biography of the emeritus king, if Alfonso had lived, his mere existence would have conditioned Juan Carlos’s subsequent behavior in the fight between his father and Franco.
Felipe VI’s father has never wanted to speak publicly about this episode of his life. “To survive, he uses a classic psychological defense mechanism: divide the problems. The past already belongs to a previous life. The painful subject is thus avoided and hidden, ”explained the French psychiatrist Sylvie Angel to Laurence Debray, biographer of the monarch, in her book Juan Carlos of Spain. The most current biography of the king (2014). “Secret, however, can become an even heavier burden,” added Angel.
Corinna Larsen, ex-lover of the monarch, spoke in a podcast about what the father of Felipe VI feels when he remembers the death of his brother. “I think, deep down in his soul and in his head, he feels a lot of guilt. He has nightmares about it, ”Larsen revealed a few months ago. “He told me that his younger brother was the really brilliant one, the handsome one, the best golfer, the favorite son of his parents. Juan Carlos is very dyslexic and, despite being left-handed, they forced him to write with his right hand. He was forced to obey. I felt that his younger brother was really the light that shone in the family, ”explained the sentimental partner of the former head of state. Almost 70 years later, the ghost of Alfonsito continues to haunt Juan Carlos I.
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