A Brief War's Long Shadow: Restraint and the Origins of the Red Cross

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Both armies in the Sonderbund War showed unusually restrained conduct toward captured soldiers and civilians, a discipline historians credit with keeping a war fought between two hundred thousand armed men to under four weeks and comparatively few dead. No international body has made a genocide or crimes against humanity determination for the fighting, and none was warranted by the era's own standard: casualties were low by the measure of nineteenth century civil conflicts, and the defeated cantons were reintegrated into the new federal state rather than punished as a conquered enemy once the war ended.

That restraint carried a consequence its combatants could not have anticipated. Henry Dunant, a young man from Geneva at the time of the fighting, is understood by historians to have drawn on the war's comparatively humane conduct as part of what shaped his thinking a little over a decade later, when the horror he witnessed on a very different battlefield led him to found the International Committee of the Red Cross. A brief Swiss civil war fought largely over Jesuit schools left, indirectly, one of the founding threads of modern humanitarian law.