Henry Dunant at Solferino and the Founding of the Red Cross

On the evening of June 24, 1859, a man in a white suit arrived in the hills south of Lake Garda, in northern Italy, looking for an emperor. Henry Dunant was a businessman from Geneva with a problem about water. He had sunk money into a milling venture in French-ruled Algeria and needed land and water rights that only the French authorities could grant, so he had decided to put his case to Napoleon III in person. The emperor happened to be busy. That day his army and its Piedmontese-Sardinian allies had fought the Austrian Empire at Solferino, one of the largest battles Europe had seen in decades, and when Dunant reached the area the fighting was over and the dying had begun. He never got his water rights. He got something else instead, and so did the rest of us.

In short: Henry Dunant saw thousands of wounded soldiers left almost untended after the battle of Solferino in 1859, organized local volunteers to help, and then wrote a short book demanding that the world do better. Within five years that book had produced a committee in Geneva, a red cross on a white flag and the first Geneva Convention of 1864, the seed of the humanitarian law that still binds every nation today.

A battle that outran its doctors

Solferino was a fight of the old kind with a new kind of scale. Hundreds of thousands of men took the field across a front that stretched for miles, and the casualties ran into the tens of thousands in a single day. The armies of 1859 had surgeons, but only a handful for every thousand soldiers, and the wounded were not anyone's first priority once the shooting stopped. Men lay in the June heat on the slopes and in the farmyards where they fell. Many died of thirst, of untreated wounds and of infection rather than of the bullet or the shell itself.

Dunant came into this almost by accident. He made his way to Castiglione delle Stiviere, a small town a few miles from the battlefield, where wounded men were being carried by the cartload and packed into churches, barracks and private houses. The largest church in town, the Chiesa Maggiore, became an improvised hospital, its floor covered in straw and bodies. There was little water, less food, no organized nursing and almost no doctors.

What Dunant did next was not heroic in the movie sense. He did not operate on anyone. He organized. He persuaded the women of the town to bring water, soup and clean linen. He paid out of his own pocket for supplies, wrote letters for dying men to their families, and argued that the Austrian prisoners lying among the French and Italian wounded deserved the same care. The women of Castiglione took up a phrase that became attached to the whole effort, "tutti fratelli," all are brothers. A soldier of the enemy army, bleeding on the same straw, was still a person.

The book he paid to print

Dunant went home to Geneva, and for a while he went back to business. The memory did not leave him. In 1862 he published a short book, A Memory of Solferino, printing it at his own expense and sending it to the people he thought could act on it: princes, generals, ministers and the leading families of Europe.

The book does two things at once, and that is the reason it worked. The first half is reportage. Dunant describes the battle and its aftermath in plain, unsparing detail, the thirst, the flies, the men who begged to be shot. It made readers who had only ever seen war in heroic paintings look at what the paintings left out.

The second half is a proposal, and it is surprisingly practical. Dunant asked two questions. Could societies be formed in peacetime, in every country, of trained volunteers ready to care for the wounded when war came? And could the nations agree, in advance, on some "international principle," sanctioned by treaty, that would protect those volunteers and the wounded they cared for? He was not asking anyone to abolish war. He was asking whether the people who fought it could agree on a floor beneath which they would not sink, and whether they could build the institutions to hold that floor up before the next battle started.

The book was translated quickly and read widely. It found its way into the hands of the people Dunant had hoped would read it, and it found one reader in Geneva who would turn the idea into an organization.

Five men in Geneva

That reader was Gustave Moynier, a lawyer who led a Geneva charity, the Society for Public Welfare. In February 1863 the society set up a small committee to study Dunant's proposals. It had five members: Moynier; Dunant; General Guillaume-Henri Dufour, the most respected soldier in Switzerland; and two doctors, Louis Appia and Théodore Maunoir. History calls it the Committee of Five. It soon took the name the International Committee for Relief to the Wounded, and in time it became the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The committee moved fast. In October 1863 it hosted a conference in Geneva that drew delegates from across Europe and agreed on the basic design: national relief societies of volunteers in each country, working with their own armies' medical services. The next step needed governments, not private citizens. With the support of the Swiss government, a diplomatic conference met in Geneva in August 1864, and on August 22 delegates signed the Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field. A dozen states signed that day.

The first Geneva Convention is short, about ten articles, and its core ideas fit on an index card. Wounded and sick soldiers are to be collected and cared for whatever side they belong to. Military hospitals, ambulances and the people who staff them are to be treated as neutral and protected. Civilians who help the wounded are to be respected. And all of this is to be marked by a single, simple sign: a red cross on a white ground, the Swiss flag with its colours reversed, chosen as a gesture to the country that hosted the conference.

It is worth pausing on how strange this was. Governments that might be at war with each other next year signed a document promising to limit what they would do to each other's soldiers. They did it voluntarily and in writing, and they agreed to be judged by it.

What happened to the man in the white suit

Here is where the water rights come back. Dunant had spent years and a great deal of money on the humanitarian cause, and his business affairs had suffered. His Algerian venture failed, and in 1867 a financial company he was involved with in Geneva collapsed. A Geneva court found against him, the scandal was public, and the city's establishment closed its doors. He was forced out of the committee he had helped create, and he left Geneva.

For roughly the next two decades Dunant drifted, often in real poverty, living in Paris, London, Germany and elsewhere, sometimes reported to have slept rough. By the late 1880s he had settled in Heiden, a small spa town in eastern Switzerland, eventually living in the local hospital. Most of the world assumed he had died.

In 1895 a journalist, Georg Baumberger, found him there and published an article about the forgotten founder of the Red Cross. It was picked up across Europe. Honours and letters started to arrive. In 1901, when the first Nobel Peace Prize was awarded, it was shared between two men: Frédéric Passy, a French champion of international arbitration, and Henry Dunant. Dunant died in Heiden in 1910.

The man who rode to Italy to rescue a business lost the business and became one of the most consequential private citizens of his century. If there is a lesson in that, it is not a tidy one. Dunant was not a saint and was not a good manager of money. He was someone who saw a thing clearly and would not stop talking about it.

How the idea spread, and where it bent

The national societies Dunant imagined spread quickly. In the United States the story runs through Clara Barton, who had nursed soldiers in the Civil War, encountered the Red Cross movement in Europe, and founded the American Red Cross in 1881. She then lobbied for the United States to join the Geneva Convention, which it did in 1882.

The emblem itself became a lesson in how universal ideas meet particular people. During the Russo-Turkish War of 1876 to 1878, the Ottoman Empire used a red crescent instead of a cross, out of concern that the cross would be read as a Christian symbol by its soldiers. The red crescent was later recognized officially, and in 2005 a third, neutral emblem, the red crystal, was added for states and societies that wanted neither. The point of the sign was always protection, not religion, and the movement eventually wrote that down.

The law grew too, usually after a catastrophe showed where it fell short. Conventions covering wounded sailors and prisoners of war followed. After the Second World War, in which civilians died in numbers that dwarfed Solferino, states met in Geneva again and in 1949 adopted the four Geneva Conventions that are still the backbone of the law of war: wounded soldiers on land, wounded and shipwrecked at sea, prisoners of war, and, for the first time in a full treaty, civilians in enemy hands and under occupation. Two Additional Protocols in 1977 extended protections further, including to civil wars. The 1949 Conventions are among the very few treaties every state in the world has joined.

The International Committee of the Red Cross itself has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize three times, for its work in the two world wars and again in 1963, the movement's centenary, alongside the federation of national societies.

The strongest objection, and an answer

There is a serious critique of everything Dunant built, and it deserves a fair hearing. Some of his own contemporaries made it. Florence Nightingale, who knew battlefield nursing better than anyone, was skeptical of volunteer relief societies. Her worry, roughly, was that if private charity cared for the wounded, governments would be let off the hook for providing proper military medical services, and war would get cheaper to wage. A sharper modern version goes further: humanitarian law, by regulating war, makes war more acceptable. It tells generals what they may do rather than telling them to stop.

The objection has force. A law that permits killing combatants while forbidding the killing of the wounded is a strange moral object, and there are moments in history when relief work has been used as cover or as public relations by the very powers doing the damage.

Here is the case for Dunant's side, and it is the one this site makes. The alternative to rules in war has never been no war. It has been war without rules. The soldiers dying of thirst at Castiglione were not saved by anyone's principled refusal to regulate violence; they were saved, the ones who were, by women carrying water. The Geneva Conventions do not make anyone fight. They set a minimum for when people do, and that minimum has been the basis for prosecuting war crimes, for prisoner exchanges, for family tracing after wars, and for the plain fact that a hospital marked with a red cross or crescent is, in law, not a target. Where that floor is ignored, it still gives the victims a language and a record. The floor is the reason we can call violations violations.

It also matters who the floor is for. The original convention protected soldiers. The 1949 Conventions widened the circle to civilians, the people in occupied towns, in besieged cities, in detention. That widening is the story of the movement, and it is not finished. Every modern argument about aid convoys, about hospitals in war zones, about the treatment of detainees, is an argument conducted in the vocabulary Dunant's committee wrote down. You can find the current arguments, in many conflicts at once, on our human rights and foreign aid topic page.

The water rights, and the rest of us

Dunant went to Italy for his own interest, which is to say he went for the reason most people go most places. What changed history was that he looked at what was in front of him and refused to look away, and then that he did the unglamorous second thing: he wrote it down, made a specific proposal, and put it in front of the people who could act on it. A book, a committee, a conference, a treaty. None of it happened because one man felt strongly. It happened because a feeling was turned into an institution.

That is a pattern worth noticing, because it is how most humane rules get made. The people who make them are rarely in charge. They are lawyers running a local charity, doctors, a retired general, a woman who nursed soldiers in her own country's civil war and then lobbied her government for years to sign a treaty. They tend to be ordinary, persistent and a little annoying to the powerful.

What you can do

• Support relief work where you live. Dunant's whole idea was that volunteers should be trained and organized before the emergency, not after. The organizations directory lists nonprofits by cause in every state, including immigrant services, food banks, legal aid and health groups, many of which work with people who have fled wars abroad.
• Ask your members of Congress where they stand on humanitarian law. The United States has signed the 1949 Geneva Conventions, and Congress funds both foreign aid and the military. Enter your address on our representatives page to get your representative's and senators' phone numbers and contact forms, and to see their latest votes, then ask a specific question: how does the member think aid workers and hospitals in today's conflicts should be protected?
• Learn the basic rules before the next crisis. Read the short version of the four Geneva Conventions, which the International Committee of the Red Cross publishes on its own website, so you can tell when officials are describing them accurately and when they are not.
• Follow the arguments as they happen. The human rights and foreign aid page gathers reporting on aid budgets, humanitarian access and the laws of war from many outlets in one place.
• Remember the forgotten. Dunant spent years unknown in a hospital in a small Swiss town before a reporter found him. Somewhere near you there are veterans, refugees and volunteers whose stories have not been told. Ask them. Write it down.