A Very Civil War

The Swiss Sonderbund War Of 1847

Joachim Remak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367154608
• eBook ISBN: 9780429719653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

A Very Civil War is the first complete account of the important but much neglected story of Switzerlands civil war of 1847. Fought over issues similar to those of the American Civil War, the comparative civility of the Swiss warthere were fewer than one hundred casualtiesis remarkable. Indeed, a war that might have destroyed Swiss union instead contributed to a sense of cohesion and established a firm foundation for modern Swiss society. A Very Civil War is the dramatic but little-known story of Switzerlands 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. Remaks 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 Remaks lucid account are the similarities to and the contrasts with our own Civil War. Each war was crucial to its nations subsequent history, and both in essence were fought over the same issuesfederal power versus states rights, the preservation of the Union, and the defense of certain ways of life. Yet Switzerlands 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 Remaks extensive, original research in Swiss archives.

1
“Companions of the Oath”: The Background

May it be known to one and all that the people of the valley of Uri, of the community of the valley ofSchwyz, and of the community of Nidwalden, recognizing the malice of the times, have solemnly agreed and bound themselves by oath to help and defend each other with all their might and main, their property and their lives, within their valleys and without.

—Letter of Federation, August 1, 1291

For me, Switzerland is of interest only because the Canton of Lucerne—which is my fatherland—is located within its borders.

—Philipp Anton von Segesser to a friend, 1847

Small country, major artists Virgin Mary and child. Linden wood. Canton of Valais, c. 1170.

COPING, OR THE ART OF SURVIVING AGAINST THE ODDS

Several factors have helped shape the special character of Switzerland. One has been its geographic location between Europe's major powers—France, Italy, and Germany, all giants by comparison and all, should they so choose, with ethnic claims on Swiss territory. Surviving against such odds tends to sharpen the mind. Another factor has been Switzerland's poverty, or rather its paucity of natural resources, which has meant that its economic base, that of farming, though profitable enough for some, was insufficient to create overall prosperity. (The country's mountains did not become fashionable, and thus a source of tourist income, until the eighteenth century.) Two basic responses exist to such an absence of natural wealth. One is to accept deprivation as a way of life; the other is to develop the ingenuity to cope with it. The Swiss on the whole have chosen the latter. For several centuries coping included the export of people, many of them as soldiers serving in foreign armies. There were times when the term Swiss was all but synonymous with mercenary—pas de sons pas de Suisses (no pennies no Swiss), with no need to add the word soldiers. But eventually this form of economic survival was abandoned for the more satisfactory one of developing domestic activities such as business and banking and above all of manufacturing, whether of textiles (some of the finest sarongs for the East Indies were manufactured in Glarus), chocolates, or precision instruments large enough to power factories or small enough to wear on one's wrist. All of these, it may be noted, were activities that did not require the existence of treasure underground. This Swiss economy, as Christopher Herold put it in his The Swiss Without Halos, "might properly be called a work of art—if art is defined as the creation of something out of nothing."¹

Yet another factor in the development of Switzerland has been the multiethnic character of the state. This country, made up of a fraction of the population of the neighbors that surround it, has been divided into German-, French-, and Italian-speaking regions, with a small Rhaeto-Romanic, or Romansh, minority added for good measure.

To the west have been the French-speaking states, or cantons, as they came to be called in the eighteenth century. (Before that, the Swiss made do with the more modest designation of "localities" or simply "places.") They have been Geneva, Vaud, the Valais, and Neuchâtel, although the last two, despite the Swiss reputation for neatness, are not universally Francophone but contain sizable pockets of German speakers. To the north and east have been the German-speaking cantons, although that term is something of a misnomer because German was, and continues to be, only the written language of the Swiss. Any educated Swiss in that part

A fierce tradition Swiss War Council. Pen-and-ink drawing by Urs Graf (c. 1485—1528).

The cantons of nineteenth-century Switzerland.

of the country will have perfect command of it. But no matter how perfect that command, his or her spoken language will be a variation of an Alemannic dialect known generically as Schtvyzerdütsch, or Swiss German. It is a language further subdivided into its local variations such as Bernerdütsch, Züridütsch, and so on, all of them as incomprehensible to the visiting German as would be Dutch or Danish. (No such problem, happily, faces the French visitor to Geneva or the Valais.)

But to return to the face rather than the tongues of Switzerland: About the largest of what one might, for all the ambiguity of the word German, call the Swiss-German cantons neighboring Francophone Switzerland is Bern, while to the north, bordering Germany, lie the smaller cantons of Solothurn, Basel (linked to Germany by the Rhine), Aargau (the ancestral home of the Habsburgs), Zürich, Thurgau, and Appenzell. South of these, toward the interior, are some of the oldest and most rural of the cantons: Lucerne, Zug, Glarus, Schwyz, Unterwalden, and Uri. Facing Austria, to move to the east now, are St. Gall and Grisons, which is one among the two cantons—Valais is the other—able to compete with Bern in size. And bordering Italy, finally, is the Ticino, Switzerland's main Italian-speaking canton.

In a country that, taken altogether, occupies no more ground than a midsized American state, and in which both population and area of an individual canton often are smaller than those of an American county, such divisions could be deadly. Nor are the divisions merely linguistic. Rather, language and culture will often coincide. Culturally, a Genevan probably will be more at home in Paris (as Jean-Jacques Rousseau was) than in Bern, just as a citizen of the Ticino will be more likely to read a book published in Milan than in Zürich.

Yet politically, and emotionally as well, home for these people is Switzerland, not France or Italy. By and large, the tendency has been to accept those differences as a simple fact of life, the way one accepts the weather. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Swiss history has been that—in a development very different from that of the old Habsburg monarchy, for instance, or of Russia old and new—its various ethnic groups have not been lying in ambush for each other, or recycling ancient grievances. Rather, they have been opting for what Charles Darwin liked to call "coherence," the quality of cooperation that he thought was the chief distinguishing mark between civil society and nature's brutal state. Or, to quote a contemporary Swiss politician, what has characterized Switzerland has been the will to remain together, or, to use his term, Switzerland has been a "Willensnation."²

Reformation in Switzerland Huldrych Zwingli of Zürich at forty-eight. Unsigned woodcut, based on the 1549 painting by Hans Asper.

This has been so despite the fact that the country has been divided among religious lines as well. It so happened that Switzerland played a role entirely disproportionate to its size in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Both of Martin Luther's most influential fellow reformers were Swiss: Huldrych Zwingli in Zürich and Jean Calvin in Geneva. And while under the impact of Zwingli's missionary zeal, the new faith spread to Bern, Basel, Schaffhausen, and other northern cantons, that same zeal also led to a religious war. It was a war fought between the now Protestant cantons and the Conservative Catholic cantons that would not abandon their ancestral faith, among which were the union's oldest members—Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, and Lucerne.

In the end, Zwingli lost both the war and his life in that enterprise; he had accompanied Zürich's forces as an armed chaplain and was killed at the battle of Kappel in 1531. And in a microcosm of European history, the conflict left the country divided into Protestant and Catholic camps, with a tendency for the more urban and prosperous cantons to go Protestant and the poorer, more agricultural ones to remain Catholic. Besides, the war weakened both the spirit and the reality of Swiss unity, with Catholic cantons at times entering into alliances against Protestant, and Protestant against Catholic.

“E PLURIBUS UNUM”: THE FORMATION OF THE CONFEDERATION, OR THE INVENTION OF WILLIAM TELL

Direct democracy at work A Landsgemeinde, or county meeting, held at Appenzell-Outer Rhodes in 1814.

Yet a sense of coherence persisted: The Swiss idea survived. The Swiss continued to have too much in common to abandon it—memories of common struggles against Austrians and Burgundians, pride in independence, but above all perhaps another very Swiss tradition, that of democratic government, and of democracy in its direct form in particular. Switzerland was and is the land of the town and county meeting, of the plebiscite and the referendum. The May Landsgemeinde, or county assembly, reads the ancient fundamental law of the canton of Schwyz, which gave Switzerland its name, "is the greatest power and prince of the land, and may without condition do and undo."³ And it was in Rousseau's birthplace, Geneva, which lived by the rule of that same prince, that the philosopher picked up the idea that individuals who allowed themselves to be represented had, by virtue of that act, already lost their liberty.

Along with this faith in democracy, the federal character of the Swiss state, or rather union of states, has shaped the country's character and, in spite of all the differences, made it cohere. In fact, the origins of Switzerland as we know it today go back to an act of union. It was concluded on August i, 1291, between the three cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Nidwalden. The agreement they signed was modest in a way; it certainly was no call to arms against the Habsburgs, who then ruled the region. In fact, it contained a promise to remain faithful to Habsburg rule; it would take a much later age to invent William Tell and his band of freedom fighters. But the document of August 1, or Letter of Federation, as it came to be called, also contained a clear reiteration of ancient liberties and local rights. These rights included that of choosing only judges who were citizens of their locality and "to refuse to accept or acknowledge any judge who has bought his office for any kind of reward or money. " They also included the key issue of revenue raising—it remained the right of each locality, so the Letter asserted, to determine what taxes were to be levied and who was to collect them. But what was perhaps more significant than any single provision was the fact that the three localities of Uri, Schwyz, and Nidwalden were forming an alliance with each other, promising to act jointly "against one and all ... who should meet them, or any single one of them, with any act of force, harassment, or indignity."⁴

The founding document The Letter of Federation of August 1, 1291, between Uri, Schwyz, and Nidwalden, with the seal of Schwyz missing.

The Letter of Federation was less than a declaration of independence, then, although it is so celebrated in Switzerland today, as solemnly and festively as the Fourth of July is in the United States. Yet it was more than a routine document. It was the beginning, even though it would take many a confrontation and many a battle still—especially the victories over the Austrians at Morgarten in 1315 and at Sempach in 1386—before foreign domination, whether that of Austria, of Burgundy, or of Savoy, would come to a definite end in the seventeenth century. And the agreement was the beginning, too, in that over the years other localities joined the original three, thus ultimately swelling the number of conjurati to twenty-three.

The term conjurati deserves some explanation, because it would later assume a particularly Swiss meaning. There appeared in the Letter of Federation of August 1 1291, a reference to a similar agreement concluded earlier, "Those present," read a passage in the Letter, "hereby take a sacred oath to renew and strengthen the ancient confederation."⁵ (The text of that earlier document has been lost; that of 1291 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. "Companions of the Oath": The Background
• 2. "Look How They Ride in on a Sow ...": The Causes of Conflict
• 3. War on Lucerne: The Great Partisan Raid
• 4. A Separate League, and the Fight Is On
• 5. "A Powerful, Painful Display of Force": The War Begins
• 6. Reluctant General: Guillaume Henri Dufour
• 7. War by Demonstration, or, the Army That Did Not March on Its Stomach: Fribourg Surrounded
• 8. "No Dishonor": The Surrender of Fribourg
• 9. Next Target: Lucerne
• 10. "Declare Yourself, General, Will You Fight or Won't You?": The Fate of Lucerne
• 11. The Sonderbund Vanishes: Ending the War
• 12. Intervention Resisted: Securing the Peace
• 13. "To a Peaceful Life": Forming a New Union
• 14. Aftermath: Whatever Became of Them?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• List of Illustration Credits
• About the Book and Author
• Index