ultra

ultra, the extreme right wing of the royalist movement in France during the Second Restoration (1815–30). The ultras represented the interests of the large landowners, the aristocracy, clericalists, and former émigrés. They were opposed to the egalitarian and secularizing principles of the Revolution, but they did not aim at restoring the ancien régime; rather, they were concerned with manipulating France’s new constitutional machinery in order to regain the assured political and social predominance of the interests they represented.

The ultras first emerged within the royalist movement in 1815. They controlled the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the French parliament) in 1815–16 and again from 1821 to 1827. They dominated the Cabinet in 1821–24 (i.e., the last years of Louis XVIII’s reign), and in the latter year their leader, the Count d’Artois, succeeded to the throne as Charles X. During his reign the ultras continued in power and were able to partly fulfill their political program, which called for tightened restrictions on the press and increased power for the Roman Catholic church. Owing to the unpopularity of their policies, the ultras lost control of the Chamber of Deputies in 1827, and their ministry ended (along with Charles X’s reign) in the July Revolution of 1830, after which the faction ceased to exist.