The World

Yet the new head of state was a sacred king descended from four centuries of monarchs: Sihanouk broadcast from Beijing to tell the peasants to support the Khmer Rouge. Earlier he had trekked into the jungle to meet Pol Pot, his ego tickled, his suspicions disarmed by Brother No. 1’s calm humility. Sihanouk returned to Phnom Penh to the royal palace; Pol Pot lived for a while in the Silver Pagoda where the leadership held its meetings, then moved to the old State Bank Building, codenamed K-1. As he orchestrated Year Zero, ‘bad elements’ were told, ‘To keep you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss.’ Then, to save ammunition, they were beaten to death with cudgels. Children were removed from families. Son Sen supervised the slaughter with ‘a schoolmasterish eye for detail’, his Santebal torturing and killing thousands at their headquarters, a converted school codenamed S-21, and at 150 lesser killing centres. The Khmer Rouge sometimes ate the livers of victims, used unborn foetuses as talismans and buried bodies as fertilizer. Over a million were executed; 2.5 million died in all.

Sihanouk defended Democratic Kampuchea publicly. The Khmer Rouge’s brutality was known even before they took Phnom Penh, but in this Faustian compact Sihanouk embraced a benumbed strategic ignorance to ensure his survival and as part of his manoeuvrings to oust the myrmidons when he got the chance. Taken on a rural tour by No. 4 Khieu Sampan he saw what was happening, but it was too late. He tried to resign but was kept under house arrest. He had colluded not just in the slaughter of his people – 33 per cent of males died – but in that of his own family: five of his own children were liquidated. The pressure was punishing even for Angkar. Paranoiac stress drove Pol’s wife insane, until she was finally incapacitated with schizophrenia. Phnom Penh was the first of America’s toppling dominos; next, on 30 April 1975, Saigon fell to the Viet Cong; on 23 August, Vientiane, capital of the kingdom of Laos, fell to the Communist Pathet Lao, its last king worked to death in prison camps.

After unleashing the Killing Fields, Pol flew to meet Mao, who praised Year Zero: ‘One blow and no more classes … a splendid achievement’. But, just as Stalin had lectured him, he lectured No. 1. ‘You’re right. Have you made mistakes? Certainly you have. Do rectification.’ Pol privately disdained both Khrushchev and Mao; the latter’s revolution ‘has faded and is wavering’ unlike ‘the brilliant red’ of his own. But Mao’s warning was shrewd. Pol Pot aggravated the pro-Soviet Vietnamese, who fresh from their defeat of America would tolerate no lessons from their own former province.

Soon after meeting Pol, in January 1976, Mao’s elegant premier Zhou Enlai died. The Helmsman himself could barely move or speak without the interpretation of his nurses, but was still acute and vigilant. When students used Zhou’s funeral to protest, he dismissed Deng, again, but placed Little Cannon under house arrest, specifying that he was not to be harmed. After planning to crown his wife’s acolyte, Wang Hongwen, one of the Gang, he surprised everyone by choosing Hua Guofeng, governor of his home province, whom he had met when he inspected the shrine at his birthplace. His nurses read him Sima Guang’s history and, as he sank, Jiang Qing barged in, massaging his limbs, giving orders to doctors. But the master of the deathbed does not always inherit the kingdom.

THE CRUSADER AND THE PRINCE: EUROPEAN TYRANTS AND DEMOCRATS

As Mao listened to the histories of the emperors and toyed with his heirs, a European monarch was arranging his own succession. On 30 October 1975 Francisco Franco, now eighty-two, fell into a coma. He saw himself as a ruler in the tradition of Ferdinand and Isabella and Philip II, so only a king could succeed a Franco. It helped that he had no son, just a daughter Carmen. He planned a royal succession of the Bourbons, the ancient French Capet family that had ruled Spain from 1714 until the revolution of 1931, balancing both branches along with his own Movimiento Nacional

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The count of Barcelona, son of the last king, had asked Franco if his sons could study in Spain. Franco agreed. In 1956, the two princes, the elder son Alfonso and Juan, were fooling around with what they assumed was an unloaded pistol. Juan pointed it at Alfonso and pulled the trigger. It was loaded, and the prince was killed. ‘Say you didn’t do it on purpose?’ screamed their father. As he toyed with the two branches of the Bourbons, Franco took an interest in the handsome Juan, who, advised by his father, promised the generalissimo to respect his authoritarian vision.