Henry Dunantthe WildfireENFP

On 25 August 1867, Henry Dunant resigned as secretary of the committee in Geneva he had helped to found. He was 39. On 8 September he was removed from it altogether. That committee would become the International Committee of the Red Cross.

That spring a Geneva company called the Crédit genevois, on whose board he sat, had gone under. Dunant went bankrupt with it, and so did relatives and friends who had trusted him with their money. A Geneva court later found that he had knowingly deceived his partners. He left the city and never went back.

To see how far he fell, go back eight years, to a church in northern Italy.

In June 1859 Dunant was 31, a businessman traveling on behalf of his ventures in French Algeria. On the evening of the 24th he reached Solferino, where a great battle had been fought that day. The wounded poured into the nearby town of Castiglione, and he stayed.

In the main church alone, he later wrote, nearly five hundred soldiers lay piled together, with a hundred more on straw outside. Nobody was in charge. So he started organizing care, and the women of the town joined him.

An enemy soldier lay on the same straw as a friendly one, and somebody had to decide whether he got water. A stranger from Geneva decided that he did, and a town followed him. “Tutti fratelli,” the women repeated. All brothers. This is what Wildfires do in an emergency: they see the person, ignore the category, and start before anyone gives permission.

He went home and wrote the book. Then he became the cause. He traveled, lobbied and talked his way into royal courts, and the movement for the wounded took shape in Geneva.

His business in Algeria and his seat on the Crédit genevois board got whatever hours were left, which was not many. Wildfires rarely mean to neglect the accounts. Something more important simply turns up every day. When the collapse came, it came all at once.

For two decades afterward he drifted, poor and nearly forgotten. From 1892 he lived in a hospice in Heiden, a small Swiss town above Lake Constance, in Room 12. In 1895 a newspaper editor found him there and reminded the world what it owed him.

In 1901, at 73, he shared the first Nobel Peace Prize. He stayed in Room 12. He never spent any of the prize money.

He died in Heiden on 30 October 1910, aged 82. He had already lost one fortune to a cause. The second he simply left alone.