L’ultraroyalisme

L’ultraroyalisme is presented through Lucien de Rubempré’s conversion to the royalist press, a political choice driven less by settled conviction than by the promise of social advancement. Coralie urges him to abandon the Liberals for the Ultras, arguing that their opponents cannot overthrow the government and that royalist service might make Lucien a count, a peer of France, and the husband of a rich woman. His new allegiance becomes public when he joins Le Réveil, but it also turns political journalism into a test of consistency, a contest for influence, and a source of personal danger.

Political Promise and Personal Advantage

Coralie gives Lucien a practical account of the political landscape. The Liberals, she says, conspire and have killed the Duke of Berry, but will never bring down the government; by contrast, the royalist side may soon return to ministerial power. She relays Madame du Val-Noble’s report that Théodore Gaillard is founding Le Réveil to answer the jokes of the Liberal papers, including Le Miroir, and that Villèle and his party may be in office within a year. Coralie advises Lucien to join the royalists before they have power, so he can benefit from the change rather than arrive after it.

The attractions she names are concrete and personal: Lucien might become the Count of Rubempré, serve the government, receive a peerage, and marry a wealthy woman. Coralie even suggests that she could use her influence at the chancery to help secure the decree granting his title. In her counsel, ultraroyalism is less a doctrine to study than a route through political service toward status and fortune. Her emphasis on what is fashionable makes that calculation especially plain: allegiance is presented as both opportunity and social style.

The Challenge of Political Consistency

Daniel d’Arthez and Léon Giraud oppose Lucien’s move on grounds that join personal integrity to political consequence. D’Arthez points out that Lucien has written for Liberal papers and attacked the Romantics, the Right, and the government; he cannot now defend the government, the Right, and the Romantics without, in his view, staining his character. Lucien answers that his reasons belong to a higher order of thought and that the end will justify his actions. The exchange makes the conversion a conflict between a public record and a newly chosen position, not simply a change of newspaper.

Giraud broadens the warning beyond Lucien’s reputation. He describes the royalist and ministerial papers as a retaliatory force, founded to answer the Liberal press with its own insults and mockery. Although he condemns the Liberal papers’ conduct, he argues that answering abuse in kind will legitimate personal attacks as an accepted public right. The opposing political groups, he says, are divided over how to suppress the Revolution but aligned in their wish to suppress the press. Thus a campaign advertised as a defense of monarchy risks strengthening the very practices that could invite censorship back into public life.

Giraud’s forecast is deliberately political as well as moral. If the royalist papers help persuade the public that the Bourbons intend to attack the material gains of the Revolution, he warns, the people may eventually rise and drive them out. Lucien, too, could find himself attached to the defeated party. The argument makes ultraroyalism an unstable wager: the movement’s immediate access to governmental power does not guarantee public legitimacy or lasting success.

Le Réveil and the Press Campaign

The next day, Lucien lets his name appear among the contributors to Le Réveil. Its prospectus, distributed through ministerial channels in one hundred thousand copies, presents his recruitment as a conquest. At a nine-hour banquet for the royalist press, the writers turn their political alignment into a declared campaign. Nathan calls for an all-out attack on Liberal and Classical writers, without distinction of age or sex; the meeting ends with a unanimous resolution for a war to the death, its differences and ideas drowned in flaming punch.

The scene exposes the gap between professed principle and practice. One writer calls for an honorable restoration of journalism and rejects gifts and booksellers’ money, yet the gathering immediately embraces coordinated ridicule and partisan attack. Lucien volunteers to target figures associated with the Liberal side, including the heroes of Le Constitutionnel and its orators. The royalist newspaper is therefore not represented as a calm forum for political argument: it joins a retaliatory press system in which ridicule is organized as a weapon and a writer’s public identity becomes part of the campaign.

The backlash follows quickly. A remark made at the banquet is disclosed to Le Miroir by a bookseller who attended, but the leak is attributed to Lucien. The Liberal papers treat his defection as a signal for an assault, mocking the failures of his sonnets and calling him a poet without sonnets. His new political affiliation brings visibility, but also makes him a conspicuous target for the press he has left.

Faction, Ambition, and the Limits of Conversion

The royalist camp does not offer Lucien uncomplicated solidarity. Around Coralie’s theatrical prospects, Hector Merlin warns that Lucien has made mortal enemies of Étienne Lousteau and Nathan, and that the Liberal papers have an advantage in theatre coverage. More broadly, Lucien discovers that Gaillard expects newcomers to provide prolonged proofs of loyalty before their party will trust them. His recent conversion leaves him vulnerable: he has entered a faction whose insiders question whether he can be relied upon, even as he faces hostility from his former allies.

The narrative depicts competition inside the royalist and ministerial press as a struggle over a share of power. Writers scheme against one another, accuse rivals of insufficient zeal, and devise hidden ways to damage competitors with the authorities. The image of men fighting over a cake gives the factional contest a material edge: access to political favor is a prize to be divided, and shared allegiance does not remove personal rivalry. In Giraud’s account, Liberal journalists, distant from governmental favors, have fewer such internal disputes; that contrast helps explain why Lucien’s new camp proves difficult to navigate.

Lucien does not try to untangle those rivalries or wage a sustained struggle within the party. He remains fixed on obtaining his title, which he believes will open the way to a good marriage and leave his fortune to chance and his beauty. Ultraroyalism consequently functions in his story as both a political commitment and an instrument of social ambition. Its promise of advancement draws him into a campaign whose tactics compromise the integrity his friends defend, while its internal jealousies and external press war make the promised ascent precarious.