Ultra-royalists
Ultraroyalistes
LeaderPrince Charles, Count of Artois
Founded1815 (1815)
Dissolved1830 (1830)
Succeeded byLegitimists
NewspaperLa Gazette
La Quotidienne
Le Conservateur
IdeologyMonarchism
Reactionarism[1][2]
Ultramontanism[3][4][5]
Conservatism[6][7]
Political positionRight-wing[8]
ReligionRoman Catholicism
Chamber of
Deputies (1824)
413 / 430
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The Ultra-royalists (French: ultraroyalistes, collectively Ultras) were a French political faction from 1815 to 1830 under the Bourbon Restoration. An Ultra was usually a member of the nobility of high society who strongly supported Roman Catholicism as the state and only legal religion of France, the Bourbon monarchy,[9] traditional hierarchy between classes and census suffrage (privileged voting rights), while rejecting the political philosophy of popular will and the interests of the bourgeoisie along with their liberal and democratic tendencies.[10]

The Legitimists, another of the main right-wing factions identified in René Rémond's Les Droites en France, were disparagingly classified with the Ultras after the 1830 July Revolution by the victors, the Orléanists, who deposed the Bourbon dynasty for the more liberal king Louis Philippe.

Second White Terror

Following the return of Louis XVIII to power in 1815, people suspected of having ties with the governments of the French Revolution or of Napoleon suffered arrest. Several hundred were killed by angry mobs or executed after an informal summary court-martial. The episodes happened primarily in the south of France.[11]

Historian John Baptist Wolf argues Ultra-royalists—many of whom had just returned from exile—were staging a counter-revolution against the French Revolution and also against Napoleon's revolution.

Throughout the Midi — in Provence, Avignon, Languedoc, and many other places — the White Terror raged with unrelenting ferocity. The royalists found in the willingness of the French to desert the king fresh proof of their theory that the nation was honeycombed with traitors, and used every means to seek out and destroy their enemies. The government was powerless or unwilling to intervene.[12]

Bourbon Restoration

Charles X's personal philosophy was more in line with the Ultras than Louis XVIII's had been

Inaugurating the Bourbon Restoration (1814–1830), a strongly restricted census suffrage elected to the Chamber of Deputies an Ultra-royalist majority (la Chambre introuvable) in 1815–1816 and again from 1824 to 1827. Known to be "more royalist than the king" (plus royalistes que le roi), the Ultras were the dominant political faction under Louis XVIII (1815–1824) and Charles X (1824–1830). Opposed to the limitation of the sovereign's power under the constitutional monarchy, they hoped to restore the Ancien Régime and annul the rupture created by the French Revolution. Passionately espousing the ruling ideology of the Restoration, the Ultras opposed liberalism, republicanism and democracy. While Louis XVIII hoped for a moderate restoration of the Ancien Régime, acceptable to the masses who had participated in the Revolution, the Ultras held rigidly to the dream of an integral restoration. Their power was due in part to electoral laws which largely favored them: on one hand a Chamber of Peers composed of hereditary members and on the other hand a Chamber of Deputies elected under a heavily restricted census suffrage of approximately 100,000 voters.

Jean-Baptiste de Villèle, Ultra-royalist Prime Minister of France from 1821 to 1828

In 1815, an Ultra majority was elected to the chamber of deputies. Louis XVIII dubbed them La Chambre Introuvable, "the unfindable chamber", due to his astonishment at a group of deputies more royalist than himself. Under the guidance of his chief minister the Armand-Emmenuel de Vignerot du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu, Louis XVIII finally decided to dissolve this turbulent assembly, invoking Article 14 of the Constitutional Charter. There followed a "Liberal Interlude" from 1816–1820, a period of "wilderness years" for the Ultras. Then on 13 February 1820, the Duke of Berry was stabbed by a republican assassin as he left the Paris Opera House with his wife and died the next day. This outrage strengthened the Ultras, who then introduced laws such as the Law of the Double Vote which allowed them to further dominate the Chamber of Deputies. In addition to other factors, Louis XVIII's health was in serious decline, reducing his resistance to Ultra demands: even before he came to the throne, the Comte d'Artois (Charles X) already dominated the government.

The 1824 death of Louis XVIII, whom they saw as too moderate, lifted the spirits of the Ultras: they expected their leader, the new king Charles X, would soon become an absolute monarch, answerable only to God. In January 1825, Villèle's government enacted the Anti-Sacrilege Act, instituting capital punishment for the theft of sacred monstrance vases (with or without consecrated hosts). This "anachronistic law" (Jean-Noël Jeanneney) was never seriously applied and was repealed in the first months of Louis Philippe's reign (1830–1848). The Ultras also wanted to create courts to punish Radicals and passed laws restricting freedom of the press.

Legitimists, the successor of the Ultras

The 1830 July Revolution replaced the Bourbons with the more liberal Orléanist branch and sent the Ultras back to private life in their country chateaux. However, they retained some influence until at least the 16 May 1877 crisis and even further. Their views softened, their principal aim became the restoration of the House of Bourbon and they became known from 1830 on as Legitimists. The historian René Rémond has identified the Legitimists as the first of the "right-wing families" of French politics, followed by the Orléanists and the Bonapartists. According to him, many modern far-right movements, including parts of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front and Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre's Society of St. Pius X, should be considered as parts of the Legitimist family.

Notable members

Electoral results

Election year No. of

overall votes

 % of

overall vote

 No. of

overall seats won

 +/– Position Leader
Chamber of Deputies
1815 35,200 87.5%
350 / 400
New
 1st (majority) François-Régis de La Bourdonnaye,

Comte de La Bretèche

1820 34,780 36.9%
160 / 434
 2nd (minority) Jean-Baptiste Séraphin, Comte de Villèle
1824 90,240 96%
413 / 430
Increase 253
 1st (majority) Jean-Baptiste Séraphin, Comte de Villèle
1827 40,420 43.1%
185 / 430
Decrease 228
 1st (majority) Jean-Baptiste Séraphin, Comte de Villèle
1830 47,940 50.7%
282 / 556
Increase 97
 1st (majority) Jules de Polignac, Duke de Polignac
  1. ↑ This change is compared to the last general election which was in August 1815. The elections in 1816, 1817, and 1819 were all by-elections and those results are included

See also

References

  1. ↑ De Bertier, Ferdinand; De Bertier de Sauvigny, Guillaume (1993). Editions Tallandier (ed.). Souvenirs d'un ultra-royaliste (1815-1832). Tallandier. ISBN 9782235021197.
  2. ↑ De Waresquiel, Emmanuel (2005). Fayard (ed.). L'histoire à rebrousse-poil: Les élites, la Restauration, la Révolution. Fayard. ISBN 9782213659480.
  3. ↑ Histoire de France, pendant les annees 1825, 1826, 1827 et commencement de 1828, faisant suite a l'Histoire de France par l'abbe de Montgaillard. Vol. 1. 1829. p. 74.
  4. ↑ Treuttel et Würtz, ed. (1844). Encyclopédie des gens du monde: répertoire universel des sciences, des lettres et des arts ; avec des notices sur les principales familles historiques et sur les personnages célèbres, morts et vivans. Vol. 22. p. 364.
  5. ↑ Bailleul, Jacques-Charles (1819). Situation de la France. p. 261.
  6. ↑ Le Normant, ed. (1818). Le Conservateur: le roi, la charte et les honnêtes gens. Vol. 1. p. 348.
  7. ↑ Reboul, Pierre (1973). Presses Univ. Septentrion (ed.). Chateaubriand et le conservateur. p. 288.
  8. ↑
    • Jean-Jacques Oechslin (1960). Le mouvement ultra-royaliste sous la Restauration: son idéologie et son action politique (1814-1830). Librairie générale de droit et de jurispurudence, R. Pichon & R. Durand-Auzias. p. 209.
    • Pierre Triomphe, Pierre Triomphe (2013). L'antiparlementarisme sous la Restauration. Parlement[s], Revue d'histoire politique 2013/3 (n° HS 9). pp. 35–47.
    • Bertrand Goujon (2012). Monarchies postrévolutionnaires. 1814-1848: (1814-1848). Vol. II (Le Seuil ed.). Paris. ISBN 9782021094459.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  9. ↑ Ultraroyalist. Dictionary of Politics and Government, 2004, p. 250.
  10. ↑ "Ultra". Encyclopaedia Britannica. "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".
  11. ↑ Gwynn Lewis, "The White Terror of 1815 in the Department of the Gard: Counter-Revolution, Continuity and the Individual" Past & Present No. 58 (February 1973), pp. 108–135 online.
  12. ↑ John Baptiste Wolf (1963). France: 1814-1919, the Rise of a Liberal-democratic Society. p. 36.
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