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A Very Civil War: The Swiss Sonderbund War of 1847
A Very Civil War is the dramatic but little-known story of Switzerland’s civil war of 1847, the Sonderbundskrieg. This conflict, as much as any other single event, inspired the revolutionaries of 1848 to action. As the German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath wrote at the time: “In the highlands was the first shot fired./What now, we still are waiting./But I know that there will be/A new burst of liberty.”Remak’s is the first complete account of an important but much neglected turning point in Swiss and in European history. What will be most striking to American readers of Remak’s lucid account are the similarities to and the contrasts with our own Civil War. Each war was crucial to its nation’s subsequent history, and both in essence were fought over the same issues—federal power versus states’ rights, the preservation of the Union, and the defense of certain ways of life. Yet Switzerland’s was a war that, unlike its American counterpart, was fought with a minimum of violence. The war that might have destroyed Swiss union instead contributed to a sense of cohesion and established a firm foundation for modern Swiss society.The Swiss Civil War settled the great issues of nationhood at a cost of fewer than a hundred dead and lasted less than three weeks. There was no implacable Swiss Sherman, bent on the utter destruction of the enemy. Instead, General Guillaume Henri Dufour, commander in chief of the Federal Forces, chose to outmaneuver his opponents rather than outfight them. The Sonderbund War was also notable for the constant regard shown by the armies on both sides for the rights of noncombatants (General Dufour went on to help found the International Red Cross), and the conflict was followed by quick, genuine, and lasting reconciliation.This lavishly illustrated book, the first account in English of this “very civil war,” is based on Professor Remak’s extensive, original research in Swiss archives.
- GenresHistory
221 pages, Hardcover
First published August 17, 1993
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May 28, 2019
‘It had been a good war,’ Joachim Remak concludes near the end of this book, and part of you thinks, really? A good war? Can you say that? But he has a point. As civil wars go, the Sonderbund War was especially civil. It lasted just 25 days, killed around 90 people, and resulted not just in a unified Swiss state, but also in a new concept of humanitarian conflict. It also helped ignite the wave of progressive revolutions that swept across Europe the following year.
To put this in context, you only need to look ahead fifteen years to America's civil war, which in many ways was fought over a similar principle – that of federal control versus states' rights – but which led to nearly a million deaths. It isn't just the population difference, since even proportionally there is a huge gulf between the two; and one of the objectives of Remak's book is to ask why this is and what we might learn from how this particular war was carried out.
The Sonderbund (‘separate alliance’) was a loose union of eight Swiss cantons – basically the rural, Catholic, conservative ones – who wanted to protect their interests against an increased centralisation of power among the other more urban, prosperous, Protestant cantons. Part of the conflict was religious (as in England, one of the triggers was the dissolution of the monasteries, in this case those of Aargau), but for most people this was seen as just one aspect of a wider cultural clash between ‘those resisting modernization and those endorsing it’.
Things took a long time to come to blows, the Swiss being a fairly polite people as a rule. And when, eventually, war ‘broke out’, it was in a rather hesitant, someone-please-hold-me-back kind of a way. Which is all to the good. A lot of the responsibility for this goes to the leader of the Confederate (i.e. state) forces, General Dufour, who led a remarkably eirenic campaign.
‘From the first,’ Remak says, ‘his strategy in essence was to avoid bloodshed, to outmaneuver rather than to outfight the enemy.’ Basically, he'd put all his troops in one place, camp them menacingly outside a town, and wait for the enemy to surrender from nervous boredom. Dufour's captains, who were spoiling for a decent bust-up, were often furious with him, but he was constantly very aware of the fact that his objective was not to wipe out the inhabitants of the Sonderbund, but rather to reach a state of affairs where they could again all live together in perfect harmony, like they do on my piano keyboard.
Amazingly, this strategy worked. Fribourg surrendered after a one-day siege, and Zug gave up when they heard the news without even waiting to be surrounded. The only real fighting came during the advance on Lucerne: the dreaded Battle of Gisikon, the bloodiest encounter of the war, left 37 dead and 100 wounded. This remains the last pitched battle in Swiss history, since when the army has turned to their trusty Swiss Army Knives mainly for the corkscrew and fish-scaler attachments.
If you look purely at the numbers, it would be possible to be even more flippant than I usually am, and treat the whole thing as a bit of a joke. It wasn't a joke, of course, for those involved, but it was also meaningful across the continent and beyond. For those interested in warfare, the humanitarianism of Dufour's campaign was an inspiration, and he later helped found the Red Cross (which took a reversed Swiss flag as its emblem).
But more to the point, liberal forces around Europe were watching closely. Many heads of state were hoping that the Sonderbund would win out and assert the righteousness of ‘traditional values’; for them, the Sonderbundskrieg was thus ‘a vital question’ (as Frederick William IV put it to Queen Victoria). Radicals, on the other hand, welcomed the result of the war as a triumph of progress over tradition.
For them, the Swiss conflict was the catalyst for the series of revolutions in 1848 that lit up Paris, Berlin, Prague, Vienna and Rome – an idea captured by the German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath (‘Im Hochland fiel der erste Schuss’, in the Highlands was the first shot fired). But…in none of these cases, really, was a liberal movement successful in the long-term – except for Switzerland itself, which emerged in 1848 as the unified (if diverse) federal state it has remained. Once again the Swiss proved to be a weird and illuminating exception – but it's not clear, from this book or any other, why the hell that should be.
To put this in context, you only need to look ahead fifteen years to America's civil war, which in many ways was fought over a similar principle – that of federal control versus states' rights – but which led to nearly a million deaths. It isn't just the population difference, since even proportionally there is a huge gulf between the two; and one of the objectives of Remak's book is to ask why this is and what we might learn from how this particular war was carried out.
The Sonderbund (‘separate alliance’) was a loose union of eight Swiss cantons – basically the rural, Catholic, conservative ones – who wanted to protect their interests against an increased centralisation of power among the other more urban, prosperous, Protestant cantons. Part of the conflict was religious (as in England, one of the triggers was the dissolution of the monasteries, in this case those of Aargau), but for most people this was seen as just one aspect of a wider cultural clash between ‘those resisting modernization and those endorsing it’.
Things took a long time to come to blows, the Swiss being a fairly polite people as a rule. And when, eventually, war ‘broke out’, it was in a rather hesitant, someone-please-hold-me-back kind of a way. Which is all to the good. A lot of the responsibility for this goes to the leader of the Confederate (i.e. state) forces, General Dufour, who led a remarkably eirenic campaign.
‘From the first,’ Remak says, ‘his strategy in essence was to avoid bloodshed, to outmaneuver rather than to outfight the enemy.’ Basically, he'd put all his troops in one place, camp them menacingly outside a town, and wait for the enemy to surrender from nervous boredom. Dufour's captains, who were spoiling for a decent bust-up, were often furious with him, but he was constantly very aware of the fact that his objective was not to wipe out the inhabitants of the Sonderbund, but rather to reach a state of affairs where they could again all live together in perfect harmony, like they do on my piano keyboard.
Amazingly, this strategy worked. Fribourg surrendered after a one-day siege, and Zug gave up when they heard the news without even waiting to be surrounded. The only real fighting came during the advance on Lucerne: the dreaded Battle of Gisikon, the bloodiest encounter of the war, left 37 dead and 100 wounded. This remains the last pitched battle in Swiss history, since when the army has turned to their trusty Swiss Army Knives mainly for the corkscrew and fish-scaler attachments.
If you look purely at the numbers, it would be possible to be even more flippant than I usually am, and treat the whole thing as a bit of a joke. It wasn't a joke, of course, for those involved, but it was also meaningful across the continent and beyond. For those interested in warfare, the humanitarianism of Dufour's campaign was an inspiration, and he later helped found the Red Cross (which took a reversed Swiss flag as its emblem).
But more to the point, liberal forces around Europe were watching closely. Many heads of state were hoping that the Sonderbund would win out and assert the righteousness of ‘traditional values’; for them, the Sonderbundskrieg was thus ‘a vital question’ (as Frederick William IV put it to Queen Victoria). Radicals, on the other hand, welcomed the result of the war as a triumph of progress over tradition.
For them, the Swiss conflict was the catalyst for the series of revolutions in 1848 that lit up Paris, Berlin, Prague, Vienna and Rome – an idea captured by the German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath (‘Im Hochland fiel der erste Schuss’, in the Highlands was the first shot fired). But…in none of these cases, really, was a liberal movement successful in the long-term – except for Switzerland itself, which emerged in 1848 as the unified (if diverse) federal state it has remained. Once again the Swiss proved to be a weird and illuminating exception – but it's not clear, from this book or any other, why the hell that should be.
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