📍Rue du Puits-Saint-Pierre 4, 1204 Geneva, Switzerland
1828 – 1867“I was born in Geneva in 1828 into a prosperous Calvinist family, and Geneva — with its tradition of civic responsibility and its position at the crossroads of European culture — shaped everything I became. It was not in Geneva but on a battlefield in northern Italy that my life changed: at Solferino in 1859 I witnessed thirty-eight thousand men dying without adequate medical care, and I organised the local population to help them, staying for three days without sleep. I returned to Geneva and spent the next years writing A Memory of Solferino and persuading the governments of Europe to sign what became the First Geneva Convention in 1864. The Red Cross was born in this city, from this tradition of civic engagement, and I remain proudest not of the prize that came later but of that first night at Solferino when an ordinary businessman decided that what he was seeing was unacceptable.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today
Sources: Dunant, H. A Memory of Solferino (1862, translated 1939), International Committee of the Red Cross; Moorehead, C. Dunant's Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross (1998), HarperCollins