The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (The Penguin History of Europe Book 7)

by Richard J. Evans

In Switzerland, reforms passed by moderate liberals whose strength was in the towns and cities of the Protestant cantons ran into fierce objections from the largely Catholic, more rural parts of the Confederation. When the liberals passed a centralist constitution and began closing Catholic monasteries, the conservative cantons reacted by forming a ‘special league’ in 1843, the Sonderbund, in violation of the Federal Treaty of 1815. Both sides began to mobilize, and in November 1847 hostilities commenced. Federal troops captured the Sonderbund stronghold of Fribourg and installed a liberal government, which promptly expelled the Jesuits, as liberal and reforming governments everywhere were wont to do. In the Battle of Gislikon, the last pitched battle ever to involve the Swiss Army, thirty-seven soldiers were killed and one hundred wounded.