Jean-Baptiste de Villèle

Louis XVIII of France had been restored a second time by the allies in 1815, ending more than two decades of war.

He had announced he would rule as a limited, constitutional monarch.

After the Hundred Days in 1815 when Napoleon suddenly returned and was vanquished, a more harsh peace treaty had been imposed on France, returning it to its 1789 boundaries and requiring a war indemnity in gold.

Allied troops remain in the country until it is paid.

There are large-scale purges of Bonapartists from the government and military, and a brief "White Terror" in the south of France claims three hundred victims.

Otherwise the transition is largely peaceful.

Although the old ruling class has returned they do not recover their lost lands, and are unable to reverse most of the dramatic changes in French society, economics, and ways of thinking.

France intervenes in Spain in 1823, where a civil war has deposed king Ferdinand VII.

The French troops march into Spain, retake Madrid from the rebels, and leave almost as quickly as they come.

Despite worries to the contrary, France shows no sign of returning to an aggressive foreign policy and is admitted to the Concert of Europe in 1818.

Louis XVIII, for the most part, accepts that much has changed.

However, he is pushed on his right by the Ultra-royalists, led by the comte de Villèle, who condemn the Doctrinaires' attempt to reconcile the Revolution with the monarchy through a constitutional monarchy.

Instead, the Chambre introuvable elected in 1815 had banished all Conventionnels who had voted Louis XVI's death and passes several reactionary laws.

Louis XVIII had been forced to dissolve this Chamber, dominated by the Ultras, in 1816, fearing a popular uprising.

The liberals thus govern until the 1820 assassination of the duc de Berry, the nephew of the king and known supporter of the Ultras, which brings Villèle's ultras back to power.

Louis dies in September 1824 and is succeeded by his brother.

Charles X of France follows the "ultra" conservative line but is a much less effective coalition builder than Louis XVIII.

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.

The French government of the Bourbon Restoration had taken the "fan affair" ("l'affaire de l'éventail") of 1827—what the French considered an insult to the French consul in Algiers by the dey—as a pretext to invade Algeria and castigate the Dey for his "impudence."

The French consul and residents had taken off for France, while the Minister of War, Clermont-Tonnerre, had proposed a military expedition.

The ultra-royalist Count of Villèle, President of the Council, and the monarch's heir, the Duc du Berry, had opposed themselves to it.

The government had finally decided to blockade Algiers for three years.

However, the important tonnage of French ships has forced them to keep away from the coasts, while the Barbary pilots can easily espouse the geography of the coast.

Before the failure of the blockade, Polignac’s government had decided on January 31, 1830 to engage a military expedition against Algiers.

Admiral Duperré takes the command in Toulon of an armada of six hundred ships and heads for Algiers.