Henry Dunant

Born in Geneva on 8 May 1828 to a devout Calvinist family, Dunant was a businessman with interests in French Algeria and Tunisia when a detour changed everything. In 1859, traveling to petition Napoleon III, he arrived at Solferino in northern Italy just after battle and found thousands of wounded soldiers abandoned without care. Horrified, he rallied locals to tend the dying regardless of side. Back in Geneva he published A Memory of Solferino, calling for a neutral organization to care for the war-wounded. In February 1863 he joined a five-person committee that became the International Committee of the Red Cross; a year later he helped convene the diplomatic conference that produced the First Geneva Convention. Then in 1867 a business scandal bankrupted him, and the Committee expelled him. He spent the next decades poor and invisible, drifting across Europe until settling in the Swiss village of Heiden. A journalist rediscovered him in 1895, and in 1901 he shared the first Nobel Peace Prize with French pacifist Frédéric Passy. He died in Heiden on 30 October 1910.