On a June day near Solferino, a town in what’s now northern Italy, something depressingly common happened. Two European armies clashed in combat, and thousands of men lost their lives.
The Battle of Solferino was considered an important event at the time — it was the biggest European battle since the Napoleonic Wars, and it paved the way for the establishment of an independent Italy — but it’s faded from public memory outside of Italy. Its narratives are obscure these days because of the complexity of the conflict it helped to end (the battle involved France, Piedmont-Sardinia, and the Austrian Empire). It doesn’t show up in high school history classes like Waterloo, Austerlitz, Sedan, and Gettysburg do.
But it did change the world in unexpected ways. In fact, one man’s encounter with suffering at Solferino helped to make the world a little bit better. A combination of strange coincidence and basic human emotion became the foundation of the rickety structure that we call international law — a system that is in great danger today.
Thanks for reading! To support my work, please click the button below:
If you want to help keep this project going, please consider purchasing a paid subscription. Paid subscribers — it’s only about 75 cents a week! — get access to the archives, the satisfaction of supporting work they enjoy, and my undying gratitude.
Switzerland during the early 19th century was captivated by a religious movement called the Réveil — the revival. The movement’s leaders reinvigorated Calvinist Christianity, modernizing liturgies, empowering women, and encouraging believers to help the less fortunate. Henry Dunant, a young Swiss businessman from a prominent Geneva family, jumped into the Réveil with both feet. He formed Bible study groups, visited prisoners, and established the Geneva branch of the YMCA.
Dunant, like many European Christians, had a moral blind spot about colonialism. Despite his religious beliefs, he thought he might make some money trading in the French colony of Algeria, so he set up a company to acquire land and grow crops there. But he ran into interference from the French authorities in Algeria, so, like the young man with connections that he was, Dunant decided to take his problems to the emperor of France himself — Napoleon III.
He prepared to kiss some royal butt, writing up a lengthy document about how wonderful Napoleon III was so that he could present it at their meeting. Napoleon III happened to be with his army fighting against the Austrians in Italy at the time, so Dunant set off to find the emperor.
Dunant happened to catch up with Napoleon III at Solferino on June 24, 1859, just after the battle had ended. By the time he arrived, tens of thousands of soldiers lay on the battlefield. Some were dead, some were dying, some were in extreme duress.
Dunant was haunted by what he heard and saw:
The stillness of the night was broken by groans, by stifled sighs of anguish and suffering. Heart-rending voices kept calling for help. Who could ever describe the agonies of that fearful night!
When the sun came up on the twenty-fifth, it disclosed the most dreadful sights imaginable. Bodies of men and horses covered the battlefield; corpses were strewn over roads, ditches, ravines, thickets and fields; the approaches of Solferino were literally thick with dead. The fields were devastated, wheat and corn lying flat on the ground, fences broken, orchards ruined; here and there were pools of blood. The villages were deserted and bore the scars left by musket shots, bombs, rockets, grenades and shells. Walls were broken down and pierced with gaps where cannonballs had crushed through them. Houses were riddled with holes, shattered and ruined, and their inhabitants, who had been in hiding, crouching in cellars without light or food for nearly twenty hours, were beginning to crawl out, looking stunned by the terrors they had endured.
Dunant was shocked by the human suffering, but he was also taken aback by the fact that the armies that had meticulously organized the violence seemed to have no real plan to care for those they had harmed. Dunant went into action, rounding up local women to tend to the wounded. He got the French army to release imprisoned Austrian doctors who could help with medical care. He paid for the establishment of field hospitals. And he encouraged the locals to care for enemy soldiers by telling them that, as Christians, “tutti fratelli” — we are all brothers.
Dunant wrote a self-published memoir of his time in Solferino that dramatized the graphic suffering he had witnessed among the wounded:
With faces black with the flies that swarmed about their wounds, men gazed around them, wild-eyed and helpless. Others were no more than a worm-ridden, inextricable compound of coat and shirt and flesh and blood. Many were shuddering at the thought of being devoured by the worms, which they thought they could see coming out of their bodies (whereas they really came from the myriads of flies which infested the air). There was one poor man, completely disfigured, with a broken jaw and his swollen tongue hanging out of his mouth. He was tossing and trying to get up. I moistened his dry lips and hardened tongue, took a handful of lint and dipped it in the bucket they were carrying behind me, and squeezed the water from this improvised sponge into the deformed opening that had been his mouth. Another wretched man had had a part of his face-nose, lips and chin-taken off by a sabre cut. He could not speak, and lay, half-blind, making heart-rending signs with his hands and uttering guttural sounds to attract attention. I gave him a drink and poured a little fresh water on his bleeding face. A third, with his skull gaping wide open, was dying, spitting out his brains on the stone floor. His companions in suffering kicked him out of their way, as he blocked the passage. I was able to shelter him for the last moments of his life, and I laid a handkerchief over his poor head, which still just moved.
Dunant concluded:
But why have I told of all these scenes of pain and distress, and perhaps aroused painful emotions in my readers? Why have I lingered with seeming complacency over lamentable pictures, tracing their details with what may appear desperate fidelity?
It is a natural question. Perhaps I might answer it by another: 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?
Haunted by his experience, Dunant got to work. He banded together with other Swiss businessmen and philanthropists to form the International Committee of the Red Cross, an organization that has done immense good over the last century and a half. But he wanted to go further than that. He wanted laws to govern how nations could deal with one another.
International law is a funny thing. Within a country, lines of authority are clear. The government makes laws, it has agencies that enforce them, and the penalties for violating the laws are clear. But, in our modern system of sovereign states, no authority sits above the nation. Each country is sovereign. International laws are, therefore, more fragile, because they require the consent of everybody involved to keep them going.
Despite these difficulties — and though the idea of restraint in wartime is oxymoronic — Dunant thought it was important that there be rules to govern the behavior of countries in combat. He thought that, even if he couldn’t eliminate warfare altogether, he could at least minimize the type of pointless suffering that he had seen at Solferino.
Dunant persuaded the Swiss government to host 12 countries for discussions about “The Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field.” The agreement that the countries reached, which bound them all to treat wounded enemy soldiers and allow the Red Cross to help with humanitarian aid in times of war, became known as the First Geneva Convention. It was the beginning of the construction of the fragile structure that became modern international law.
Things didn’t work out very well for Henry Dunant in the end. His business in Algeria fell apart, he went bankrupt, and his business partners accused him of fraud. It was a big scandal in Geneva; he moved to Paris to escape criticism. There, Dunant kept dreaming of utopian solutions to the world’s problems (he became a proponent of a global library from which all humans could learn), but he no longer had the resources to implement them. His movement chugged on without him; the Red Cross spread around the world, though it no longer advertised his role in its founding.
It wasn’t until the end of his life that a historian uncovered Dunant’s role in the founding of the ICRC and resurrected his reputation. He received the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901 at the age of 73. By this time, it was clear that his efforts to establish rules around international activity had borne fruit.
The First Geneva Convention provided a foundation for more agreements between the world’s nations. Subsequent conventions established the rights of prisoners of war and protections for civilians in times of war. These agreements led to the formation of international organizations like the League of Nations, which attempted to regulate interactions between countries in order to maintain peace.
Though these agreements and organizations didn’t always succeed in keeping the peace, the idea of an international order based on rules persisted. After World War II, allied governments established the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Health Organization, and many more. These organizations were built around the ideas in the preamble of the UN Declaration of Human Rights:
Whereas it is essential… that human rights should be protected by the rule of law…
Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations…
Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom…
Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms.
Did nations always follow international law? No. Did they consistently demonstrate their belief in the principles of the Geneva Conventions and the UN? Of course not. But the world did get more peaceful. There was no World War III, and countries at least had to pay lip service to these universal values of peace and human rights.
The relatively stable and prosperous world that we all enjoy today is, in part, due to the efforts of Henry Dunant and other dreamers who believed that nations could and should behave according to common values. These visionaries convinced the world that everyone, even the powerful, was better off if they all agreed to limit their behavior and work together.
Over the ensuing 150 years, people built a system of international law on this foundation that, though certainly imperfect, has saved millions of lives and made the world a better place.
But the structure that humanity built on Dunant’s insights at Solferino has always been vulnerable. Since it has beenconstructed through the voluntary cooperation of nations, it is vulnerable if powerful countries abandon the system — or worse, actively work to demolish it.
We find ourselves in just such a situation, as authoritarian regimes in countries like China and Russia, joined by the new leadership of the United States, attack the international order that diplomats have painstakingly built. They may succeed, but they should be careful what they wish for. A world without rules is, as Henry Dunant understood, a world of chaos and cruelty.
This newsletter is free to all, but I count on the kindness of readers to keep it going. If you enjoyed reading this week’s edition, there are three ways to support my work:
You can subscribe as a free or paying member:
You can share the newsletter with others:
You can “buy me a coffee” by sending me a one-time or recurring payment:
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again next week!
