It ensued after seven Catholic cantons formed the Sonderbund ("separate alliance") in 1845 to protect their interests against a centralization of power.

The Protestants took Baden and started blockading the Catholic cantons.

The monastery experienced a heyday during the time of the reformation due to Luzern being a prominent city for the Swiss Catholic cantons.

Politically, this gave the Catholic cantons a majority in the Tagsatzung, the federal diet of the confederacy.

While the official Church remained passive during the beginnings of the Reformation, the Swiss Catholic cantons took measures early on to keep the new movement at bay.

Beginning about 1530, culminating around 1600, and then slowly diminishing, numerous witch trials were held in both Protestant and Catholic cantons.

The war had been waged along religious lines, with the predominantly Catholic cantons in the South being the losers to the predominantly Protestant cantons.

Swiss women go from the more Catholic cantons to more liberal Protestant regions.

In 1843, the conservative city patricians and mountain or Ur-Swiss from the largely Catholic cantons were opposed to the new constitution.

The governors were appointed from both Catholic and Protestant cantons and since they changed every two years, neither faith gained a majority in the County.