The 'civil' War

The year is 1847. General Dufour is the leader of the nationalist army and he has just given the rebel leaders his battle plans and strategies. He is not a traitor though, he is just Swiss. He passed the plans along because he wanted to convince his opponents to surrender and avoid needless bloodshed [1]. Only in Switzerland can you find such a ‘civil’ civil war.

In 1845, with the rise of the reform-minded liberal party in the Swiss legislature that wanted to draft a new constitution that would limit the power of the Catholic Church, several predominantly Roman Catholic provinces formed a union called the Sonderbund to oppose the federal government’s plan. The liberal party, which was primarily Protestant, wanted reforms. They were reformists. The Catholics, however, did not want these reforms. They were conservatives. In the fall of 1847, the government ordered the Sonderbund to disband [2]. In response, the rebel provinces took up arms. The nationalists’ army, led by a Napoleonic War veteran, General Dufour, vastly outnumbered the rebels’. The war lasted less than a month, before Dufour claimed victory. While the two armies (a total of about 150,000) clashed, less than 100 died in battle. During the whole war though, both sides kept to their ‘Swiss nature’. Both sides tended to the wounded of the enemy, POWs were simply returned to their homes and placed under house arrest until the end of the war, and Dufour refused to use missiles because it would cause too many deaths. At the end of all of it, Switzerland became a federal state [3].

Due to the fact that the reformists, who merely wanted to reform and change the Constitution, won the war, we can categorize it as a reformist war. Although it has elements of a revolution, because the outraged Catholics led a revolt against the Protestants, if the Sonderbund had won it would still be categorized as reformist because all they wanted was to not suppress the Church and would have probably