Jean Henry Dunant
The Nobel Peace Prize 1901
Born: 8 May 1828, Geneva, Switzerland
Died: 30 October 1910, Heiden, Switzerland
Founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva,
Originator Geneva Convention (Convention de Genève)
In 1859, a battle was raging at the town of Solferino in Northern Italy.
There the Swiss businessman Henry Dunant saw thousands of Italian, French and
Austrian soldiers killing and maiming each other. On his own initiative, he
organized aid work. Later he wrote the book A Memory of Solferino, which
contained a plan: all countries should form associations to help the sick and
wounded on the battlefield - whichever side they belonged to.
The result was the establishment of the International Committee of the Red
Cross in 1863, and the adoption of the Geneva Convention in the following year.
It laid down that all wounded soldiers in a land war should be treated as
friends. Medical personnel would be protected by the red cross in a white
field.
For Dunant personally, financial difficulties led to poverty and loss of
social respect. But the organization he had created grew, and the underlying
ideas won gradual acceptance. It pleased the ageing Dunant that the Norwegian
Nobel Committee rewarded his life's work with the Nobel Peace Prize.
Jean
Henry Dunant‘s life (May 8, 1828-October 30, 1910) is a study in contrasts.
He was born into a wealthy home but died in a hospice; in middle age he
juxtaposed great fame with total obscurity, and success in business with
bankruptcy; in old age he was virtually exiled from the Genevan society of
which he had once been an ornament and died in a lonely room, leaving a bitter
testament. His passionate humanitarianism was the one constant in his life, and
the Red Cross his living monument.
The Geneva household into which
Henry Dunant was born was religious, humanitarian, and civic-minded. In the
first part of his life Dunant engaged quite seriously in religious activities
and for a while in full-time work as a representative of the Young Men’s
Christian Association, traveling in France, Belgium, and Holland.
When he was twenty-six, Dunant
entered the business world as a representative of the Compagnie genevoise des
Colonies de Sétif in North Africa and Sicily. In 1858 he published his first
book, Notice sur la Régence de Tunis [An Account of the
Regency in Tunis], made up for the most part of travel observations but
containing a remarkable chapter, a long one, which he published separately in
1863, entitled L’Esclavage chez les musulmans et aux
États-Unis d’Amérique [Slavery among the Mohammedans and in the
United States of America].
Having served his commercial
apprenticeship, Dunant devised a daring financial scheme, making himself
president of the Financial and Industrial Company of Mons-Gémila Mills in
Algeria (eventually capitalized at 100,000,000 francs) to exploit a large tract
of land. Needing water rights, he resolved to take his plea directly to Emperor
Napoleon III. Undeterred by the fact that Napoleon was in the field directing
the French armies who, with the Italians, were striving to drive the Austrians
out of Italy, Dunant made his way to Napoleon’s headquarters near the northern
Italian town of Solferino. He arrived there in time to witness, and to
participate in the aftermath of, one of the bloodiest battles of the nineteenth
century. His awareness and conscience honed, he published in 1862 a small
book Un Souvenir de Solférino [A Memory of Solferino], destined to make him famous.
A Memory has
three themes. The first is that of the battle itself. The second depicts the
battlefield after the fighting – its «chaotic disorder, despair unspeakable,
and misery of every kind» – and tells the main story of the effort to care for
the wounded in the small town of Castiglione. The third theme is a plan. The
nations of the world should form relief societies to provide care for the
wartime wounded; each society should be sponsored by a governing board composed
of the nation’s leading figures, should appeal to everyone to volunteer, should
train these volunteers to aid the wounded on the battlefield and to care for
them later until they recovered. On February 7, 1863, the Société genevoise
d’utilité publique [Geneva Society for Public Welfare] appointed a committee of
five, including Dunant, to examine the possibility of putting this plan into
action. With its call for an international conference, this committee, in
effect, founded the Red Cross. Dunant, pouring his money and time into the
cause, traveled over most of Europe obtaining promises from governments to send
representatives. The conference, held from October 26 to 29, with thirty-nine
delegates from sixteen nations attending, approved some sweeping resolutions
and laid the groundwork for a gathering of plenipotentiaries. On August 22,
1864, twelve nations signed an international treaty, commonly known as the
Geneva Convention, agreeing to guarantee neutrality to sanitary personnel, to
expedite supplies for their use, and to adopt a special identifying emblem – in
virtually all instances a red cross on a field of white.
Dunant had transformed a
personal idea into an international treaty. But his work was not finished. He
approved the efforts to extend the scope of the Red Cross to cover naval
personnel in wartime, and in peacetime to alleviate the hardships caused by
natural catastrophes. In 1866 he wrote a brochure called the Universal and International Society for the Revival of the Orient,
setting forth a plan to create a neutral colony in Palestine. In 1867 he
produced a plan for a publishing venture called an «International and Universal
Library» to be composed of the great masterpieces of all time. In 1872 he convened
a conference to establish the «Alliance universelle de l’ordre et de la
civilisation» which was to consider the need for an international convention on
the handling of prisoners of war and for the settling of international disputes
by courts of arbitration rather than by war.
The eight years from 1867 to
1875 proved to be a sharp contrast to those of 1859-1867. In 1867 Dunant was
bankrupt. The water rights had not been granted, the company had been
mismanaged in North Africa, and Dunant himself had been concentrating his
attention on humanitarian pursuits, not on business ventures. After the
disaster, which involved many of his Geneva friends, Dunant was no longer
welcome in Genevan society. Within a few years he was literally living at the
level of the beggar. There were times, he says, when
he dined on a crust of bread, blackened his coat with ink, whitened his collar
with chalk, slept out of doors.
For the next twenty years, from
1875 to 1895, Dunant disappeared into solitude. After brief stays in various
places, he settled down in Heiden, a small Swiss village. Here a village
teacher named Wilhelm Sonderegger found him in 1890 and informed the world that
Dunant was alive, but the world took little note. Because he was ill, Dunant
was moved in 1892 to the hospice at Heiden. And here, in Room 12, he spent the
remaining eighteen years of his life. Not, however, as an unknown. After 1895
when he was once more rediscovered, the world heaped prizes and awards upon
him.
Despite the prizes and the
honors, Dunant did not move from Room 12. Upon his death, there was no funeral
ceremony, no mourners, no cortege. In accordance with his wishes he was carried
to his grave «like a dog».
Dunant had not spent any of the
prize monies he had received. He bequeathed some legacies to those who had
cared for him in the village hospital, endowed a «free bed» that was to be
available to the sick among the poorest people in the village, and left the
remainder to philanthropic enterprises in Norway and Switzerland.
