From the Sonderbund War to the Federal Constitution of 1848

The crisis of the old Confederation and the war of November 1847

The Confederation that emerged from the Congress of Vienna under the Federal Pact of 1815 was an alliance of twenty-two sovereign cantons with a common Diet (Tagsatzung), a rotating directorial canton (Vorort) and almost no central administration. The liberal regeneration of the 1830s, described for Zurich in Chapter C.III, had renewed the constitutions of many cantons. Every attempt to revise the Federal Pact nevertheless failed against the resistance of the conservative and predominantly Catholic cantons and against the reluctance of the smaller cantons to surrender sovereignty. In the 1840s the conflict took on an increasingly confessional character. The closure of the monasteries in Aargau between 1841 and 1843, the calling of the Jesuits to Lucerne and the armed volunteer raids (Freischarenzüge) against Lucerne hardened the fronts on both sides.

On 11 December 1845 seven Catholic-conservative cantons, namely Lucerne, Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden (Obwalden and Nidwalden), Zug, Fribourg and Valais, concluded a defensive alliance, the so-called Schutzvereinigung, which their opponents denounced as a separate league incompatible with the Federal Pact and called the Sonderbund. Its declared purpose was the defence of the Catholic religion and of cantonal sovereignty. The balance in the Diet shifted when the liberal-radical camp won the elections in St. Gallen in May 1847, which gave it a majority of cantonal votes. In July 1847 the Diet resolved to dissolve the Sonderbund and to expel the Jesuits. When the Sonderbund cantons refused to comply, the Diet ordered military execution. The federal army under General Guillaume-Henri Dufour of Geneva conducted a campaign that lasted from 3 to 29 November 1847. After Fribourg had capitulated on 14 November, the decisive engagement took place at Gisikon on 23 November, when federal troops crossed the Reuss on pontoon bridges and opened the road to Lucerne. Dufour's strategy of speed and restraint kept the losses remarkably low: the Swiss National Museum puts them at about 93 dead and 510 wounded in total.¹

For the history of the financial centre the military details matter less than the political consequence. A war of three weeks removed the veto that the conservative cantons had exercised over constitutional reform for thirty years. The victorious majority did not impose a punitive peace. The constitution that followed preserved the cantons as political communities, created a second chamber in which each canton had an equal voice, and left churches and schools to cantonal law. This combination of decisive central competence in economic matters with generous respect for cantonal autonomy in cultural and religious matters is a recurring pattern of Swiss constitutional history. It also explains why the economic unification of 1848 was accepted with comparatively little lasting resentment.²

The drafting and adoption of the Constitution

Constitution-making began within three months of the war. A revision commission of the Diet met for the first time on 17 February 1848 in the Rathaus zum Äusseren Stand in Bern. It had twenty-three members, all drawn from the liberal and radical camp, and was chaired by the Bernese radical Ulrich Ochsenbein. In thirty-one sessions spread over fifty-six days it produced a draft, which it completed on 8 April 1848. The draft was debated in the Diet and then submitted to the cantons. Fifteen and a half cantons accepted it and six and a half rejected it. In those cantons where the people voted, some 154,543 votes were cast in favour and 63,205 against. On 12 September 1848 the Diet declared the new Federal Constitution adopted. Six of the twenty-three members of the revision commission later sat in the first Federal Council, which illustrates how closely the drafting of the text and the building of the new state were linked in the same hands.³

The Constitution was brought into operation within weeks. The first elections to the National Council took place in October 1848 on the basis of one seat per 20,000 inhabitants. The radical-liberal camp won a commanding majority of the 111 seats, while Catholic conservatives obtained only about ten. The Council of States, with two members per canton and one per half-canton, was elected by the cantonal parliaments and Landsgemeinden. The two chambers met for the first time in Bern on 6 November 1848, amid gun salutes, church services and processions. On 16 November the Federal Assembly elected the first seven members of the Federal Council: Jonas Furrer, Ulrich Ochsenbein, Henri Druey, Josef Munzinger, Stefano Franscini, Friedrich Frey-Herosé and Wilhelm Matthias Näff.⁴

From a lawyer’s standpoint, the Constitution of 1848 is striking for its brevity and for the precision of its economic provisions. It did not contain a general catalogue of economic rights on the model of later constitutions. It did, however, contain a cluster of articles, discussed in section II, which assigned to the Confederation the customs system, the postal service, coinage, weights and measures and the manufacture of gunpowder, guaranteed free trade between cantons and granted freedom of establishment to Swiss citizens of Christian denomination. These few articles were enough to transform the economic geography of the country.

Zurich in the new federal state: Jonas Furrer and the question of the federal seat

Zurich had been one of the three alternating Vororte of the old Confederation and was, with Bern, the most populous and economically most powerful of the liberal cantons. Its most important contribution to the new state was a person. Jonas Furrer was born in Winterthur on 3 March 1805, the son of a master locksmith. He attended school in Winterthur and studied law in Zurich, Heidelberg and Göttingen, before practising as a lawyer in his home town. He entered the Zurich Grand Council in 1834 at the age of twenty-nine and became one of the leaders of the liberal opposition to the conservative government that had come to power after the Züriputsch of 1839. From 1845 he was Bürgermeister and president of the cantonal government of Zurich. In 1847 he sat on the commission of seven that tried to find a peaceful solution to the Sonderbund conflict. A year later he represented Zurich and made what the Historical Lexicon of Switzerland calls an exceptional contribution to the new Federal Constitution.⁵

When the Council of States met for the first time in November 1848, it elected Furrer as its president with thirty-three of thirty-seven votes. His reputation as a conciliator made him an obvious candidate for the executive.⁶ On 16 November 1848 the Federal Assembly elected him to the Federal Council with eighty-five votes and on the same day chose him as the first President of the Confederation. According to local tradition in Winterthur he hesitated before accepting. He headed the Political Department, held the presidency again in 1852, 1855 and 1858, later directed the Department of Justice and Police, and died in office at Bad Ragaz on 25 July 1861. More than 2,400 people attended his funeral.⁷

Furrer’s career illustrates a feature of the new state that matters for the later history of the financial centre. The Federal Council was, from the outset, a collegial body of lawyers, merchants and administrators drawn from the liberal cantonal elites. Throughout the second half of the century Zurich lawyers and businessmen were strongly represented in the federal institutions. The line from Furrer, the Winterthur lawyer, to Alfred Escher, the Zurich lawyer who dominated federal economic policy in the 1850s and 1860s (Part D), is direct.

Zurich did not, however, become the federal capital. The Constitution left the choice of the seat to federal legislation. On 28 November 1848 the National Council voted for Bern with fifty-eight votes against thirty-eight for Zurich and nine for Lucerne, a preference that the Council of States shared. Bern’s central position between German- and French-speaking Switzerland told in its favour, as did a strong current of federalist opinion which held that no leading cantonal capital should become the seat of the national government. The Bernese municipal assembly accepted the honour only narrowly, by 419 to 313 votes, on 18 December 1848. Zurich was later compensated with national institutions: above all the Federal Polytechnic School, which opened in 1855, as well as the Swiss National Museum in the 1890s.⁸

The decision had lasting consequences for the relationship between political and economic power in Switzerland. While political administration settled in Bern, commercial, industrial and, increasingly, financial leadership concentrated in Zurich. The division was later reproduced in the structure of the Swiss National Bank, which received its legal seat in Bern and the seat of its governing board in Zurich (section VII). For the financial centre, the absence of the federal government has arguably been an advantage. Zurich developed its institutions in a certain distance from the capital, relied on private initiative and cantonal institutions, and cultivated a practical, market-oriented relationship with federal authorities that remains characteristic of the city’s financial community.

Notes

1. Swiss National Museum, blog, “Als in der Schweiz Bürgerkrieg herrschte – Sonderbundskrieg” (2017), https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/2017/11/als-in-der-schweiz-buergerkrieg-herrschte-sonderbundskrieg/. The article traces the escalation from the Aargau monastery dispute to the Diet resolution of July 1847 and describes Dufour’s campaign, including the surrender of Fribourg and the battle of Gisikon. ↩
2. Swiss National Museum, blog, “Als in der Schweiz Bürgerkrieg herrschte – Sonderbundskrieg” (2017), section on consequences, https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/2017/11/als-in-der-schweiz-buergerkrieg-herrschte-sonderbundskrieg/. ↩
3. Wikipedia (de), “Schweizer Bundesverfassung 1848”, sections on the revision commission, ratification and implementation, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweizer_Bundesverfassung_1848. The voting figures are those commonly given; several cantons decided through their parliaments or Landsgemeinden, so the popular vote total does not cover the whole country. ↩
4. Parlamentsdienste, “1848 – Rückblende: Erste Wahlen: Parlament / Bundesrat”, https://www.1848-parl.ch/de/rueckblende/kapitel/erste-wahlen-parlament-bundesrat.php. The site gives the party composition of both chambers and describes the opening session and the Federal Council election. ↩
5. Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), Roswitha Feusi Widmer, “Furrer, Jonas” (French version), http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/f/F3637.php. The HLS also records an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich (1838) and Furrer’s later work on statelessness and mixed marriages. ↩
6. Parlamentsdienste, “1848 – Rückblende: Erste Wahlen: Parlament / Bundesrat”, https://www.1848-parl.ch/de/rueckblende/kapitel/erste-wahlen-parlament-bundesrat.php. ↩
7. Winterthur Glossar, “Jonas Furrer”, https://www.winterthur-glossar.ch/jonas-furrer. On the presidential years see also Wikipedia (en), “Jonas Furrer”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Furrer, which counts the presidency of 1848–1849 as one term; the HLS lists 1848 and 1849 separately. ↩
8. Robert Barth, “How Berne became the seat of government”, Swiss National Museum blog (2018), https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2018/11/how-berne-became-the-seat-of-government/. The Constitution itself (Art. 108) left the seat to federal law: Bundesverfassung der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft vom 12. September 1848, text at https://www.verfassungen.ch/verf48.htm. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.