Over a century ago, Gustave Moynier, a stocky middle-aged Genevan lawyer, author and philanthropist, proposed an international court to enforce respect for the Geneva Convention. Moynier was the second president of the Red Cross, a man whose dedication turned the flamboyant Henri Dunant’s vision into an institutional reality. Dunant, a journalist and entrepreneur, documented the agonies of the wounded soldiers left to die in the fields and vineyards of Solferino after the battle of 24 June 1859, and went on to propose both a corps of volunteers to treat the casualties and a set of ‘international principles, conventional and sacred’, to enjoin armies to respect these volunteers. The ambitions of the two men were too large to fit within the confines of a single institution. Disgraced by bankruptcy, Dunant resigned from the Red Cross to live in seclusion, until he was awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. This infuriated the self-righteous Moynier, who in the latter part of his 46-year stint as president, tried hard to expunge any mention of Dunant from the organisation’s records. Such contradictions are the stuff of the Red Cross, whose ‘International Committee’ was, until recently, drawn from a very small circle within the Protestant haute bourgeoisie of Geneva. Much of Caroline Moorehead’s immense chronicle is about the individuals – some extraordinarily courageous and eccentric, a few disastrously timid – who established ‘a movement which has no equal in size or commitment outside of organised religion’.’‘
Over a century ago, Gustave Moynier, a stocky middle-aged Genevan lawyer, author and philanthropist, proposed an international court to enforce respect for the Geneva Convention. Moynier was the...