The Red Cross founder went looking for an emperor to fix a business deal
In 1859 Henry Dunant travelled to northern Italy hoping Napoleon III would sort out water rights for his Algerian mill company. He arrived at Solferino on the evening of a battle and spent the following days organising local volunteers. The book he wrote afterwards led to the Red Cross, bankruptcy, obscurity, and finally the first Nobel Peace Prize.
Born in Geneva in 1828 into an influential Calvinist family, Dunant absorbed his parents' commitment to social work: his father helped orphans and parolees, his mother the sick and poor. As a young man he joined an almsgiving society, visited prisons and in 1852 founded the Geneva branch of the YMCA. School went less well; he left the Collège de Genève at 21 with poor grades and trained with a money-changing firm.
His business ventures took him to Algeria, where he set up a corn-growing and trading company on land granted by the French colonial authorities. When land and water rights stayed unclear, he decided to petition the emperor in person, carrying a flattering book he had written about him. On 24 June 1859 he reached Solferino as about 40,000 wounded and dead soldiers lay on the nearby battlefield with little help. Dunant rallied townspeople, especially women and girls, bought supplies, helped set up makeshift hospitals and urged them to treat every side alike under the local women's motto that all are brothers.
Back in Geneva he self-published A Memory of Solferino in 1862, 1,600 copies proposing a neutral body to care for wounded soldiers. Gustave Moynier's public welfare society took it up, and a five-member committee met on 17 February 1863, the date now treated as the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In August 1864, 12 states signed the First Geneva Convention. Yet Dunant, the idealist, clashed constantly with the pragmatic Moynier.
Then came collapse. The failure of the firm Crédit Genevois in 1867 bankrupted him, a Geneva court later condemned him for deceptive practices, and he was forced off the committee. He left Geneva for good, drifting in poverty through cities such as Stuttgart, Rome and Corfu before settling in the Swiss village of Heiden. A journalist rediscovered him in 1895, and in 1901 the first Nobel Peace Prize was split between him and Frédéric Passy, a French campaigner for peace. Heiden was where he died, in 1910.
Source: Henry Dunant
