The Sonderbund War is a brief civil war that occurred in Switzerland in November 1847 . The Union of Catholic Cantons ( Sonderbund ) was defeated in it, and Switzerland became a federation. In 1848, a new constitution was adopted. The Jesuits were expelled from the country, the ban on their activities was lifted only after a referendum in 1973 [1] [2] . During the war, less than a hundred people died, several hundred were injured.
Content
Reasons
In the early 1840s, Protestant forces proposed a new constitution for the alliance of the Swiss cantons , which called for greater centralization of power and a stronger alliance. The Catholic cantons, rejecting the new constitution and defending their desire to maintain autonomy, created Sonderbund in response.
Britain opposed the intervention of European powers in Switzerland, which Catholic Austria and France wanted. As a result, foreign forces did not actively intervene in the war.
Some cantons chose to remain neutral and did not participate in the conflict.
The course of the war
See also
- History of Switzerland
Further reading
- Church, Clive H., and Randolph C. Head. A concise history of Switzerland (Cambridge University Press, 2013). pp 132-61
- Duffield, WB The War of the Sonderbund (Eng.) // English Historical Review : journal. - 1895. - Vol. 10 , no. 40 . - P. 675–698 .
- Lerner, Marc. A laboratory of liberty: the transformation of political culture in Republican Switzerland, 1750-1848 (Brill, 2011).
- Oechsli, Wilhelm. History of Switzerland, 1499-1914 (1922) full text online pp 386-95
- Remak, Joachim. A very civil war. The Swiss Sonderbund War of 1847. Westview Press, Boulder 1993. ISBN 0-8133-1529-8
- Weaver, Ralph. Three Weeks in November: A Military History of the Swiss Civil War of 1847 (2012) excerpt
- Bucher, Erwin. Die Geschichte des Sonderbundskrieges . Verlag Berichthaus, Zürich 1966. (German)
Notes
- ↑ (French) Official results on the website of the Swiss Administration .
- ↑ (German) Cantonal Results of Referendum