Henry Dunant was born in 1828 in Calvinist Geneva, helped found the local YMCA, left college over poor grades and drifted into banking. In 1856 he launched a corn milling business in French Algeria but could not get water rights. Desperate, he set out to pitch Napoleon III in person and on the evening of June 24, 1859 reached Solferino in northern Italy, where roughly 40,000 soldiers lay dead or wounded after the day’s battle. He organized local women and girls into makeshift hospitals in churches, paid for supplies himself, got captured Austrian doctors freed to help, and insisted both sides be treated as brothers.

His 1862 book A Memory of Solferino proposed permanent neutral relief societies. With jurist Gustave Moynier he formed the Committee of Five in 1863, and in 1864 twelve nations signed the First Geneva Convention. Then his Algerian venture collapsed in 1867. Bankruptcy meant disgrace in Geneva; Moynier forced him out, steered a Paris prize away from him, and reportedly talked Napoleon III out of covering half his debts. Dunant wandered in poverty until journalist Georg Baumberger found him in 1895 in room 12 of a nursing home in Heiden. In 1901 he shared the first Nobel Peace Prize with Frédéric Passy.

• How the Geneva Convention was sold to generals as military efficiency, not mercy
• Dunant hiding ink stains on his collar with chalk while proposing a world court and world library
• Donations and recognition from the pope and the Russian royal family after the 1895 article
• The debate over whether regulating war made it more acceptable
• His final years of paranoia, making staff taste his food, and his death in October 1910