International Committee of the Red

¶ … International Committee of the Red Cross. Initially the idea of Jean-Henri Dunant, the Committee truly reached its potential with Gustave Moynier at the helm of the Swiss-based organization. However, the Red Cross may also be said to have had its true origins in the relief work provided by Camillus de Lellis and his Order of Clerks Regular more than two centuries prior to Dunant's brainchild. It was the Order of Clerks Regular, after all, that gave us the symbol of the Red Cross.

The Creation of the Red Cross

The International Red Cross was the idea of a 19th century Swiss businessman named Jean-Henri Dunant. In his 1862 book Memoir of Solferino, Dunant describes witnessing the aftermath of the battle of Solferino three years earlier. The battle had seen France and Sardinia on one side and Austria on the other. Thousands were killed and wounded on the Italian battlefield, the witnessing of which prompted Dunant to propose the organization of an international relief system and a treaty system that would assist in relief of the wounded. These proposals became the International Red Cross and the code of the Geneva Convention. This paper will discuss the creation of the Red Cross.

Dunant's (1862) own description of the battle of Solferino provides a window into what relief aid must have been like in the 19th century: "If there had been enough assistance to collect the wounded in the plains of Medola and from the bottom of the ravines of San Martino…how different things would have been! There would have been none of those long hours of waiting on June 24…and there would never have been the terrible possibility of what only too probably happened the next day -- living men being buried among the dead!" (p. 28). The scene is vivid enough, and what Dunant did in the years that followed to spread his idea among the nations of Europe effectively gave rise to the International Red Cross.

But in the a way, the Red Cross had already been formed more than two hundred years prior by the ex-soldier turned priest Camillus de Lellis. De Lillis had founded the Order of Clerks Regular, Ministers to the Sick (M.I.), which was an essentially a group dedicated to providing relief to the sick and wounded who lay on the fields of battle. Even their cassocks were emblazoned with a large, red cross, by which they were identified. The Order of Clerks Regular was, technically, the first Red Cross before the International outfit prompted by Dunant came into being (Lyons, 1917, p. 54).

Still, when people think of the Red Cross today, it is the organization that Dunant's book and actions prompted to come into being in the latter half of the 19th century. Dunant himself had always been a part of the tide of Christian charity that had been sweeping through Geneva since the Napoleonic Wars (Hutchinson, 1997, p. 12). States John Hutchinson, "Dunant's vision of voluntary societies appealed to both the Christian and the utilitarian dimensions of" the president of The Geneva Society for Public Utility (SGUP) (p. 21). This was Gustave Moynier, who essentially took Dunant's idea and ran with it: "Using his position as president, Moynier raised with the members of SGUP the possibility of their endorsing a plan for the formation of voluntary societies to aid the wounded" (p. 22). Moynier's plan would become the International Committee for Relief to the Wounded -- renamed the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1876, of which Moynier would serve as president until his death in 1910.

Dunant and Moynier quarreled over the issue of neutrality for the wounded and those dedicated to assisting them. Dunant insisted on the idea of neutrality -- but Moynier saw it as unrealistic. Dunant would even be expelled from the Committee following his own accumulation of debts. The two men would never reconcile, although they would together receive numerous honors and awards. Dunant, however, would receive one award that Moynier never would: the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.