La soledad fue el precio : vida de Carmen Díez de Rivera

Carmen Díez de Rivera was born in Madrid in 1942 into a well-known aristocratic family, whose values ​​and privileges she chose to distance herself from in her youth. She studied for a time in Paris, where she met Jean-Paul Sartre and other French intellectuals, and in the mid-1960s moved to Ivory Coast to work as an aid worker, hoping to put a painful personal experience behind her. Back in Spain, in 1967 she began studying Political Science. Having become financially independent from her family, she soon developed an openly leftist political commitment and a yearning for the dictatorship to give way to a regime of freedoms. A close friend of Prince Juan Carlos and Princess Sofía, and linked since 1969 to Adolfo Suárez's political career as his chief of staff, first at Televisión Española (TVE) and then, between 1976 and 1977, in the Prime Minister's Office, Carmen Díez de Rivera played a decisive role, always seemingly from the background, in the country's gradual democratization, its opening to Europe, and in such important episodes of the Transition as the legalization of the Communist Party of Spain. Later, disillusioned with national political intrigues and tired of the persecution by the most reactionary right wing, she left for Brussels to carry out, from 1987, brilliant work as a Member of the European Parliament, defending then-novel causes such as feminism and environmentalism. Cancer ended her life in November 1999.