An August Italian Connection:
America’s first Red Cross Chapter was founded in August 1881 by Clara Barton. The founder of the International Red Cross was Henri Dunant, a Swiss businessman. Although, neither Barton, nor Dunant were Italian, it was the Dunants’ 1859 visit to the Italian town of Solferino, in Northern Italy, after a fight between Italian forces and the Austrians who controlled the region, that Henri Dunant was inspired to help create the International Red Cross and First Geneva Convention of International Agreement on treatment of wounded prisoners and POWs.
Businessman Henri Dunant, then thirty-one, had been born in 1828, in Geneva, Switzerland. Needing the approval of French Emperor Napoleon III for a property development proposal in mid-1859, Dunant traveled to Northern Italy in hope of meeting with the emperor, who was leading his troops, helping Italian forces fight the Austrians.
Dunant learned Napoleon had marched to the Italian town of Solferino, so he hurried there. When he arrived at Solferino in the evening, he learned that a major battle had taken place there earlier in the day. Six thousand men had died and 30,000 had been wounded. Napoleon had moved on with his army. Dunant decided to stay overnight in Solferino before continuing after the emperor.
He found himself unable to sleep. He was kept awake by the cries of wounded men, heart-rending voices calling for help. In the morning, Dunant discovered that although the French had ended up in control of the battlefield, they had a severe shortage of medical staff to tend to the many wounded.
Thousands of injured men were effectively abandoned. Dunant, appalled and shaken, organized some of the townswomen into teams who cleaned the wounds of the French, Italian and Austrian soldiers, and gave them food and drink. He had small boys bring the men water in buckets, and also pressed other travelers into service to help the soldiers. Dunant was deeply moved by the tragedy around him.
He wrote: “It is, indeed, distressing to realize that you can never do more than help those who are just before you – that you must keep waiting men who are calling out and begging you to come. Then you find yourself asking: ‘Why go to the right, when there are all these men on the left who will die without a word of kindness or comfort, without so much as a glass of water to quench their burning thirst?”
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Looking for the emperor, Dunant left Solferino for French headquarters at Borghetto. Unable to speak to Napoleon, he alerted the French forces to the state of affairs in Solferino. He then traveled to the city of Brescia, where he sent letters to the families of the wounded, bought and distributed food for the men, and wrote fundraising letters to bring more help to the survivors of Solferino.
He never managed to meet with the emperor, but following his experience in Solferino, he found himself less interested in business affairs and more interested in humanitarian issues. Over the following years, Dunant was haunted by the suffering that he had seen in Italy. Remembering the effectiveness of the teams and volunteers that he had organized in Solferino, he decided that societies of volunteers should be organized in every country to help the wounded in wartime. In 1861 he decided to write a book about his experiences at Solferino.
In it, he described the aftermath of the battle, the misery and pain, the actions he had taken, and the effectiveness of the teams of volunteers he had assembled. He called for the establishment of similar societies on a permanent basis in countries around the world. Dunant worked for a year on his manuscript, which he titled A Memory of Solferino. In 1862, he published the book, printing 1,600 copies.
Dunant chose not to sell it through stores. Instead he sent copies through the mail to generals, nobles, journalists and reviewers across Europe. Reaction was immediate and mostly positive. The Queen Mother of the Netherlands sent him a letter, describing the book as “eminently philanthropic and Christian.” Dunant received similar letters from aristocrats in Italy, Austria, Prussia and Spain. Charles Dickens wrote a detailed, glowing review as did the French novelist Victor Hugo.
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Despite the overall positive reaction to the book, some readers attacked Dunant’s ideas as impractical. Many of harshest critics were officials of the French government. Aside from government officials, most readers in France found the book fair and impartial. It became a success across Europe, and Dunant had a further 1,000 copies printed to be sold in stores across the continent.
A Swiss lawyer named Gustave Moynier visited Dunant to volunteer his assistance in putting ideas of Dunant’s book into practice and invited him to come to Geneva, Switzerland, to address a meeting of the Geneva Society for Public Welfare. At the meeting in 1863, Dunant asked the members to organize a volunteer society to improve the methods by which wounded soldiers got medical treatment and transportation to hospitals.
He also told them that a permanent international committee could be founded to send relief material to war-ravaged areas and to establish a basic code of rules requiring soldiers at war to provide humane treatment to wounded enemy prisoners. Two physicians in attendance strongly supported Dunant. A five-man committee, which included Dunant and Moynier, was formed to promote Dunant’s idea.
The committee decided to organize a conference in Geneva in October. They would invite delegates from every nation in Europe to establish volunteer nursing societies and to establish international rules of conduct during times of war. Dunant decided to travel across Europe to meet with representatives of various governments and promote the proposed Geneva conference in person.
He attended the International Statistical Congress in Berlin. The organizers of the conference agreed to allow Dunant to deliver a speech on his experiences in Solferino and he added a proposal that all medical personnel be recognized as neutral in battle. From Berlin, Dunant traveled to Potsdam, Dresden, Vienna and Munich to promote his conference in Geneva.
Several countries, including Austria, Saxony, and Prussia promised to send delegates, but elements of the French government, led by the minister of war, continued to oppose Dunant’s idea. On Oct. 23, 1863, the conference opened in Geneva. Dunant’s diplomacy had paid off: Sixty-two delegates from 16 countries were in attendance, as well as five delegates from Swiss Welfare Societies and a delegate from Knights Hospitallers.
The idea that civilian volunteers should be allowed to help the wounded gained momentum. Since the main argument against the idea was that the nurses might be killed in action, everybody agreed that such nurses would need to bear an insignia that would symbolize the neutrality Dunant desired. Although many opposed mention of the neutrality of volunteer medical personnel, it became clear that the agreement on this topic was a necessity.
The delegates eventually agreed that medical volunteers from every country should wear an identical symbol, a red cross on a white background. As the conference concluded, an official diplomatic convention was scheduled for the next year, to be held again in Geneva, at which government officials would sign an agreement recognizing the neutrality of civilian medical workers. The governments would then help to establish separate national societies of Red Cross nurses. Many French officials were still opposed to the idea of the Red Cross.
The French went so far as to say that civilian volunteers would likely prove a burden to military medics. In reply, a member of the Geneva committee pointed out that Dunant’s actual experiences in Solferino proved how practical civilian nurses on the battlefield could be. Dunant had strong civilian support. He wrote a letter to Emperor Napoleon III asking for his help in establishing a French Red Cross society, and asking him to send diplomats to the upcoming conference in Geneva.
The emperor’s aide-de-camp wrote back expressing Napoleon’s general support for the conference and for the French Red Cross society, but instructed Dunant to work with the minister of war, Marshal Randon, a man much opposed to the idea of the Red Cross. Finally after many hurdles, on Aug. 22, 1864 representatives of 12 nations including, France, England, Spain, Prussia, the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Greece and Turkey agreed to sign the First Geneva Convention “for Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field.”
The agreement contained recognition of the neutrality of medical personnel on the battlefield, and set out the conditions for the establishment of national volunteer relief societies. The five-man committee that Dunant and Moynier had formed became the International Committee of the Red Cross. By 1866, 20 countries had signed the convention. Russia joined the next year.
Further international agreements followed the First Geneva Convention, covering the treatment of wounded men at sea, the treatment of prisoners of war, and the protection of civilians during wartime. In 1901, Dunant along with pacifist Frederic Passy, was awarded the first-ever Nobel Peace Prize. Dunant died in 1910.
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Clara Barton (1821-1912) was an American humanitarian and organizer of the American Red Cross. She was born in Oxford, Mass., taught school for 15 years and clerked in the U.S. Patent office before the outbreak of the Civil War. She then established a service of supplies for soldiers and nursed in army camps and on the battlefield. She was called the “angel of the battlefield.” In 1865 President Lincoln appointed her to search for missing prisoners via old records.
In Europe for a conference at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war (1870), she went to work behind the German lines for the International Red Cross. She returned to the United States in 1873 and in 1881 organized the American National Red Cross, which she headed until 1904. She was largely responsible for obtaining President Chester Arthur’s signature to the Geneva treaty for the care of war wounded (1882) and emphasized Red Cross work in catastrophes other than war.
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