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.
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.
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.
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.
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).