On All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day from the beginning of November, the honor of the dead ended with the Catholics taking up arms: on Wednesday, November 3, 1847, the Uri Brigade launched its first assault on Gotthard Pass. To penetrate Ticino and defeat the so-called radicals there.
Exactly 175 years ago, the Sonderbund War began with this battle. Since then, the civil war has been the last military conflict on Swiss soil. It lasted less than a month, cost a hundred lives (93), and paved the way from the confederation of states to today’s federal state with the 1848 federal constitution.
We owe this relatively mild course to General Guillaume Henri Dufour (1787-1875), leader of the Tagsatzungsarmee. For the engineer, cartographer, politician and later one of the founders of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), it is important not to humiliate the defeated Sonderbund cantons.
“Maneuver instead of fencing”
The Sonderbund is an association formed in 1845 between the Catholic central Swiss cantons of Lucerne, Schwyz, Uri, Zug, Obwalden and Nidwalden, and the denominational cantons of Freiburg and Valais. They want to defend themselves against liberal, mostly reformed cantons.
But with the attack on Gotthard, the Sonderbund discredited itself as a defensive alliance. Tagatzung, the assembly of cantons in the former Swiss Confederation, therefore decided to dissolve the Sonderbund militarily on 4 November. All troops were sent, except for the two neutral cantons, Neuchâtel and Appenzell Innerrhoden.
About 98,000 men from the Tagatzung troops faced 78,000 to 85,000 men from the Sonderbund army. But General Dufour chose the tactic of “manoeuvring rather than fencing” rather than beating each other’s heads. Brilliantly, he besieged Freiburg, initially isolated from the rest of the Sonderbund, and secured a truce there.
Swiss historian Joseph Jung (67) published a book about Dufour entitled “Unity, Freedom, Humanity” (NZZ Libro), where he writes: minimizing physical and emotional injuries and ending the war as soon as possible.”
Austria did not intervene at that time
This also made the state accessible to the losers. The Sonderbund cantons are slowly negotiating with Dufour. The Schwyz delegation reports their “extremely friendly” reception, envoys from Nidwalden speak of “truly French courtesy”, and the Uri government thanked Dufour in a letter for the “benevolent reception” of his delegation.
On November 29, 1847, the last two Sonderbund cantons, Uri and Valais, surrendered and – without foreign intervention – ended the war. Like the pro-Russian separatists in southern Ukraine, the Sonderbund had both material and ideal supporters abroad. Conservative powers at that time were Austria, Prussia, and Russia, as well as Catholic France.
Constantin Siegwart-Müller (1801-1869) of Lucerne played an active role in this. As head of the Sonderbund War Council, he contacted the Austrian State Chancellor Prince Metternich (1773-1859) and persuaded him to intervene. Next to the Sonderbund movement.
“First of all, the foreign powers were stunned by the rapid victory of the Tagatzung troops,” writes Jung of “Dufour’s brilliant work”. The fact that they did not invade Switzerland in the autumn of 1847 was also due to the diligence shown to the civilian population and the captives on Dufour’s orders.
Joseph Jung (ed.), “Unity, Freedom, Humanity – Guillaume Henri Dufour as General, Engineer, Surveyor and Politician”, NZZ Libro