Henry Dunant: Red on the Cross

Henry Dunant, the son of a francophone upper-class bourgeois family from Geneva, worked for a Swiss exploitation company in French Algeria. Determined to address the colonists' lack of water, he resolved to convince both the company and Emperor Napoleon III to build a dam. After his uncle, Dr. Hubert Dunant, diagnosed him with malaria rather than Algerian typhus, and during his first encounter with nurse Cécile Thuillier—when he dropped his drawers for an injection—he also met Léonie Bourg-Thibourg, the fiancée of his ambitious brother Daniel and the daughter of the company’s director. With the board’s approval of his plan, Henry set out to meet the emperor, who refused to receive him. Stuck in Castiglione, part of the Austrian province of Lombardy that French troops were attempting to liberate, Henry was saved by his Geneva friend Dr. Louis Appia, who introduced him to suspicious Austrian troops as his medical assistant.