Neon-Fox-News: Small Country - Big Ideas #10

In June 1859, the Geneva businessman Henry Dunant travels through northern Italy. He hopes to ask Emperor Napoleon III for support for his mill business in Algeria. Instead, he finds himself near the town of Solferino, where Austrian and French-Sardinian troops have just fought one of the bloodiest battles of the era. Tens of thousands of soldiers lie dead or wounded on the field. There are few doctors, almost no bandages, and no organization to care for the injured.

Dunant stays. In nearby Castiglione delle Stiviere, he organizes care in churches and houses together with local women. He arranges for bandages to be found, water to be distributed, and letters to be written to families. They tend soldiers from both sides without asking which army they fought for. The idea that wounded men should be treated not as enemies but as people in need is unusual for the warfare of the time.

Dunant does not yet know how to turn his experience into something lasting. His wish to help the wounded remains an idea without structure. In 1862, he publishes A Memory of Solferino in Geneva, describing the suffering he witnessed and making two demands: voluntary relief societies should be founded in every country, prepared in peacetime for the case of war, and an international treaty should protect the wounded and those who care for them. The book attracts attention across Europe.

What proves decisive is that Dunant finds allies. In Geneva, the Society for Public Welfare takes up his proposals. Together with the lawyer Gustave Moynier, General Guillaume-Henri Dufour, and the physicians Louis Appia and Théodore Maunoir, he forms a committee of five. It constitutes itself in February 1863 and later becomes the International Committee of the Red Cross. In October 1863, representatives from several states meet in Geneva and adopt principles for relief societies. As a common emblem, they choose a red cross on a white background, the reverse of the Swiss flag.

The breakthrough follows in August 1864. Twelve states sign the first Geneva Convention in Geneva. It obliges signatory states to care for wounded soldiers regardless of their allegiance and protects medical personnel, field hospitals, and ambulances. For the first time, states agree on an international treaty that limits the conduct of war.

Dunant experiences the success of his idea only in part as his own. After his business goes bankrupt in 1867, he falls into financial hardship, loses his standing in Geneva, and leaves the city. For years he lives in poverty and obscurity. In the 1890s, a journalist rediscovers him in a nursing home in the Appenzell village of Heiden. In 1901, Dunant receives the first Nobel Peace Prize in history, shared with the French pacifist Frédéric Passy. He dies in 1910 and does not live to see how far the movement will grow.

Over the following decades, the Geneva initiative grows into a worldwide organization. National societies are founded. The Ottoman Empire uses the Red Crescent as a protective emblem from 1876, and the movement later adds further emblems; in 2005, the Red Crystal joins them. In the First World War, the ICRC sets up a tracing service for prisoners of war and passes millions of messages between prisoners and their families. It receives the Nobel Peace Prize in 1917 and 1944, and in 1963 jointly with the League of Red Cross Societies, from which today’s International Federation emerges. After the Second World War, the Geneva Conventions are renewed in 1949 and extended to protect civilians. Additional Protocols of 1977 and 2005 develop international humanitarian law further.

The consequences reach far beyond war. Red Cross and Red Crescent societies provide disaster relief, run blood donation services, teach first aid, and help during epidemics. The idea that rules apply even in war shapes military law, war crimes trials, and the self-understanding of many states.

Yet the history of the movement is not free of difficult questions. During the Second World War, the ICRC was criticized for not publicly denouncing the persecution and murder of European Jews. It later acknowledged that it had failed at the time. The principle of neutrality, which is meant to secure access to all parties to a conflict, repeatedly clashes with the wish to name injustice openly. Protective emblems are also ignored or misused in modern conflicts, and aid workers themselves become targets. A movement founded on humanity must keep weighing how much restraint is needed in order to be able to help at all.

A businessman on a battlefield, a book of memories, and a red cross on white cloth: Dunant’s experience began as a personal shock. More than 160 years later, it has become a body of rules that protects millions of people in wars and disasters.

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