This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Sonderbund War grew directly out of a dispute over Catholic religious institutions within an increasingly centralized and secularizing Swiss state. The federal diet had closed Aargau's monasteries in 1841 and pressed for the Jesuit order's expulsion from Swiss territory generally, and when the canton of Lucerne responded by inviting Jesuits to run its schools rather than comply, seven Catholic cantons, Lucerne, Fribourg, Valais, Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden and Zug, formed the Sonderbund, a defensive league, to protect their own religious institutions against the federal majority.
Fighting broke out on November 3, 1847, when General Guillaume Henri Dufour led a federal army of roughly one hundred thousand against the Sonderbund's smaller forces, and the war ended in less than four weeks with the alliance's formal dissolution on November 29. Its consequences reshaped the country: the 1848 federal constitution transformed Switzerland from a loose confederation into a federal state with a central government, and it constitutionally barred the Jesuit order from operating anywhere in the country, a ban that stood for more than a century afterward.