The king who left Spain in 2020 under the shadow of financial scandals stood this Saturday in La Ferté-Vidame, west of Paris, thanking in flawless French the jury that awarded him the Saint-Simon Prize for his memoir "Reconciliation". It is his second French literary prize in six months: in April the same book won the Political Book Prize of the French National Assembly. In Spain, by comparison, the book has sold more than 160,000 copies, yet not a single institution has handed him a plaque.

The difference was explained by the co-author herself, the historian Laurence Debray, without any circling around it: in France Juan Carlos remains "the man of an exemplary democratic transition", while in Spain his figure is overshadowed by the recent scandals. She added that in the final round the memoir beat her own father, the philosopher Régis Debray, and the singer Patti Smith - by an absolute majority. The jury unanimously called the text "an exceptional testimony".

The prize has existed since 1975 and goes each year to an author of memoirs. The venue is not incidental: La Ferté-Vidame holds the ruins of the castle of the Duke of Saint-Simon, the memoirist of Louis XIV's court, who after withdrawing from court wrote some 12,000 pages of recollections there. Juan Carlos used the parallel to the full. "I began this project with Laurence Debray myself when I left the Zarzuela Palace to find myself under distant skies, in the United Arab Emirates," he said. "I needed the distance and the calm this new host country gave me to re-examine my path. Amid doubts and wounds, but far from bitterness, I decided to leave the Spanish a final legacy: to write my version of the truth."

That is the sentence worth stopping at. A former head of state writing "his version of the truth" from Abu Dhabi, rewarded by a French academy for the courage to testify rather than stay silent. How many former leaders in the Balkans have chosen the same sequence from a comfortable distance: first the departure, then the memoir, then a prize from somebody who never paid the bill? Let the question stay open, but the model is familiar.

The family turned out in numbers. Infanta Elena, granddaughters Victoria Federica de Marichalar and Irene Urdangarin, his sister's granddaughter Maria Zurita, his goddaughter Adélaïde d'Orléans, Álvaro and Antonella de Orleans-Borbón. Only Infanta Cristina was missing, held up on a humanitarian cooperation trip. To be in France, Juan Carlos left the regattas in Sanxenxo and missed the trophy ceremony, which for a man photographed at the helm all week is no small sacrifice.

In his speech he returned to his origins: born in Rome, raised in Switzerland and Portugal, sent to Spain at the age of ten, today a resident of Abu Dhabi. "I have a weakness for France, where I am always received with such warmth. And for French, which was my first language and became my language for writing. Like a return to my roots." The book has already been translated into Arabic and sells well in Latin America. Asked whether a second volume is coming, Debray laughed: "It is not planned... as far as I know, at least." The day ended with a cocktail reception and a queue of people wanting to greet the prize-winning memoirist in the country of the memoirist of kings.