ultra

ultra

Member of the extreme right (ultraroyalist) wing of the royalist movement in the French Bourbon Restoration (1815–30). The ultras included large landowners, clericalists, and the former émigré nobility. Opposed to the French Revolution's secular and egalitarian principles, they called for restrictions on the press and greater power for the Catholic church. They controlled the Chamber of Deputies and the cabinet for most of the 1820s, especially during the reign of their leader Charles X. Their policies proved unpopular, and they lost power after 1827; with the July Revolution (1830), the faction ceased to exist.

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Ultra

Allied intelligence project that, in tapping the very highest-level communications among the armed forces of Germany and Japan, contributed to the Allied victory in World War II. In the early 1930s Polish cryptographers first broke the code of Germany's cipher machine Enigma. In 1939 they turned their information over to the Allies, and Britain established the Ultra project at Bletchley Park to intercept and decipher Enigma messages. The Japanese also had a modified version of the Enigma, known as “Purple” by the Americans, who were able to duplicate it well before Pearl Harbor. The intercept of signals helped Allied forces win the Battle of Britain and the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway and led to the destruction of a large part of the German forces following the Allied landing in Normandy.