The comte d'Artois, brother to King Louis…

The comte d'Artois, brother to King Louis XVIII of France, who had been restored as the Bourbon monarch in 1814, had headed the ultra-royalist opposition, which had taken power in 1820 after the traumatic assassination of his son, the duc du Berry, with the ministry of the comte de Villèle.

Villèle continues as chief minister after Artois succeeds his brother in 1824 as Charles X.

Emotionally, Charles has never really recovered from his son's murder.

The Villèle government had voted the Anti-Sacrilege Act in January 1825, which punishes by death the theft of consecrated hosts.

Under pressure from the liberal press, including the Journal des débats, which hosts the articles of the influential François-René de Chateaubriand, the Villèle cabinet had resigned in 1827.

Chateaubriand, considered the founder of Romanticism in French literature, has become highly popular as a defender of press freedom and the cause of Greek independence.

After Villèle's downfall, Charles X appoints him ambassador to the Holy See.

Villèle’s successor, Jean-Baptiste Sylvère Gay, vicomte de Martignac, is on January 4, 1828, appointed minister of the interior, and, though not bearing the title of president, becomes the virtual head of the cabinet.

France’s liberal faction, gaining a majority in the Chamber of Deputies in the 1828 elections, begins working to repeal Charles’s ultraconservative laws prohibiting sacrilege and controlling the press, the church, supervision of schools, return of the Jesuits, dissolution of the national guard and compensation to the émigrés.

Martignac succeeds in passing the act abolishing press censorship, and in persuading the King to sign the ordinances of June 16, 1828 on the Jesuits and the small seminaries.