Calle de Henri Dunant

The name honours Jean-Henri Dunant (Geneva, 1828-1910), the man who turned the horror of a battlefield into an institution that still cares for the wounded today. In June 1859 he was travelling to meet Napoleon III and, almost by chance, reached Solferino as the evening of the battle fell. What he saw marked him forever: thousands of wounded soldiers abandoned among the dead, without water or care. He improvised relief with the women of the village, who tended one side and the other without asking which, under a motto he made his own: tutti fratelli, all brothers. Back in Geneva he wrote an account that proposed something new: bodies of neutral volunteers to aid the wounded in war. From that idea came the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863, and the first Geneva Convention the following year. In 1901 he received the first Nobel Peace Prize. The cause ruined him, and he spent his final years all but forgotten, shut away in a Swiss hospice, while the red cross on a white field travelled the world.