One battlefield, one book, and the rules every nation signed.

The story

How an idea became a movement.

24 June 1859
Solferino, Lombardy

The battle

In the summer of 1859, France and the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia were at war with the Austrian Empire over the future of northern Italy. On 24 June, more than a quarter of a million soldiers met near the village of Solferino, south of Lake Garda. By nightfall some 40,000 men lay dead, dying or wounded across the hills.

The armies' medical services were tiny and quickly overwhelmed. Wounded soldiers lay where they fell, often for days, without water, dressings or anyone to help them.

Henry Dunant, a 31-year-old businessman from Geneva, was not there to fight. He had travelled to Lombardy to ask Emperor Napoleon III for help with land and water rights for his company in French-ruled Algeria. He arrived on the evening of the battle and found himself among the wounded.

June–July 1859
Castiglione delle Stiviere

“Tutti fratelli”

Thousands of the wounded were carried to the nearby town of Castiglione. Dunant stayed. In the town's main church, the Chiesa Maggiore, he organised local people, mostly women, to wash wounds, bring water, write letters home and sit with the dying. He bought supplies with his own money.

They cared for French, Italian and Austrian soldiers alike. The women of Castiglione had a phrase for it, which Dunant repeated to anyone who hesitated: tutti fratelli, “all are brothers.” That idea, that a wounded enemy is no longer an enemy, is the root of everything that followed.

1862
Geneva

A Memory of Solferino

Back in Geneva, Dunant could not put what he had seen behind him. In 1862 he published Un souvenir de Solférino (A Memory of Solferino), paying for 1,600 copies himself and sending them to political and military leaders across Europe.

The book did more than describe horror. It ended with two practical proposals: every country should set up a volunteer relief society, trained in peacetime, ready to care for the wounded of any side in war; and states should agree on an international rule that would protect those volunteers and the wounded they cared for.

Would it not be possible, in time of peace and quiet, to form relief societies for the purpose of having care given to the wounded in wartime by zealous, devoted and thoroughly qualified volunteers? Henry Dunant, A Memory of Solferino, 1862 (English translation)

17 February 1863
Geneva

The Committee of Five

The book reached the Geneva Society for Public Welfare, a local charity led by the lawyer Gustave Moynier. It set up a small committee to study Dunant's proposals. That committee met for the first time on 17 February 1863, the date now counted as the founding of what became the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

• Henry DunantBusinessman, author of the idea
• Gustave MoynierLawyer, later its long-serving president
• Guillaume-Henri DufourGeneral, its first president
• Louis AppiaSurgeon with battlefield experience
• Théodore MaunoirSurgeon

In October 1863 the committee invited governments to a conference in Geneva. Delegates from 14 states agreed that each country should form a relief committee, that volunteers should work under the protection of the armies, and that they should wear one recognisable sign: a white armband with a red cross.

22 August 1864
Geneva

The first Geneva Convention

A year later, the Swiss government called a diplomatic conference. On 22 August 1864, twelve states signed the Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field: Baden, Belgium, Denmark, France, Hesse, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Prussia, Spain, Switzerland and Württemberg.

It had only ten articles. But for the first time, governments had signed a permanent, written promise to limit what war may do to people. Wounded soldiers had to be cared for whatever their nationality, and the people caring for them could not be attacked. Read the key articles below.

1867–1910
Paris, Heiden

The founder's fall and return

Dunant's own story then took a harsh turn. In 1867 his businesses collapsed and he was declared bankrupt. Geneva society did not forgive him, and he was forced out of the committee he had inspired. For years he lived in poverty, moving between European cities, largely forgotten.

He eventually settled in the small Swiss village of Heiden, living in its hospital. In 1895 a journalist, Georg Baumberger, found him there and wrote about him, and the world remembered who had started the Red Cross. In 1901 Dunant received the first Nobel Peace Prize, shared with the French pacifist Frédéric Passy. He died in Heiden on 30 October 1910 and left his prize money to charity.

Timeline · 1863 to today

From five men in Geneva to a worldwide movement.

The story of the movement as a whole, from its Geneva committee to the rules that now bind every state.

1. 1863

   The committee is born. Five citizens of Geneva form a permanent committee on 17 February. In October they bring 36 participants to Geneva, 18 of them sent by governments, who agree on national relief societies, protection for volunteers and one common sign.

2. 1864

   The first Geneva Convention is signed by 12 states on 22 August. The first national relief societies take shape across Europe, from Belgium and Denmark to France, Prussia, Spain and Württemberg.

3. 1867

   The national societies meet for their first international conference in Paris. The same year Dunant, now bankrupt, leaves the committee.

4. 1876

   A name and a second emblem. The Geneva committee becomes the International Committee of the Red Cross. In the Russo-Turkish War, the Ottoman Empire's relief workers use a red crescent.

5. 1901

   The first Nobel Peace Prize goes to Henry Dunant, shared with Frédéric Passy.

6. 1906

   The first revision of the 1864 Convention. A year later, the Hague Conventions of 1907 carry its protection to war at sea.

7. 1914

   A card index for a world at war. On 15 October the ICRC opens its International Prisoners-of-War Agency in Geneva. By 1918 it has passed on some 20 million letters and messages and 1.9 million parcels, and helped identify about 2 million prisoners.

8. 1917

   Nobel Peace Prize for the ICRC, the only one awarded during the First World War.

9. 1919

   A federation for peacetime. National societies form the League of Red Cross Societies, today the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).

10. 1925

    Gas and germs are banned. The Geneva Protocol outlaws the use of poison gas and biological weapons in war.

11. 1929

    Prisoners of war get their own convention, and the red crescent is formally recognised alongside the red cross.

12. 1939

    The Second World War. The ICRC's Central Agency builds an index of some 45 million cards and relays about 120 million messages; its delegates make thousands of visits to prisoner-of-war camps. It does not speak out against the Nazi extermination camps, a silence it now calls the greatest failure in its history.

13. 1944

    A second Nobel Peace Prize for the ICRC's wartime work.

14. 1949

    The four Geneva Conventions are adopted on 12 August. For the first time, civilians in enemy hands are protected by a treaty of their own.

15. 1963

    The centenary is marked by a third Nobel Peace Prize, shared by the ICRC and the League.

16. 1965

    Seven Fundamental Principles are adopted in Vienna for the whole movement.

17. 1977

    Two Additional Protocols, adopted on 8 June, strengthen the protection of civilians and reach into civil wars.

18. 1990

    A seat at the United Nations. The General Assembly grants the ICRC observer status, the first private organisation to receive it.

19. 2005

    A third emblem, the red crystal, is added for those who want a sign free of any national or religious reading.

20. 2011

    Health Care in Danger. The ICRC launches a global campaign against attacks on hospitals, ambulances and medical workers.

21. 2022

    Mirjana Spoljaric Egger becomes the first woman to lead the ICRC, on 1 October.

22. Today

    Every state in the world is party to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, and Red Cross and Red Crescent societies work in more than 190 countries.

Vienna, 1965

Seven principles.

What began as a reaction to one battlefield became seven principles for the whole movement. Here is what each one means in practice, in our words. The official wording is published by the ICRC.

Sources and credits

Read further.

• British Red Cross: the origins of the movement. Engraving courtesy of the British Red Cross.
• International Committee of the Red Cross, Wikipedia: history and timeline of the ICRC.
• Henry Dunant, Wikipedia. Portrait of Henry Dunant in the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
• ICRC international humanitarian law database: full texts of the Geneva Conventions and their Protocols.
• The Avalon Project, Yale Law School: text of the 1864 Geneva Convention.