War and compassion

The Franco-Prussian War was actually a worldwide conflict, in a sense, and a European conflict in reality.

Now, this is a war started by the French which ended very badly for the imperial regime. It moves very quickly into becoming a sort of popular war, a war of the French Republic against the German states, unified, and eventually unified Germany will be the winner of this conflict. It's a conflict that matters enormously for European and global history because, of course, it's at the roots — the deep roots — of the First World War on the one hand, at least this Franco-German rivalry that we see again in 1914 and that we witness again, of course, in 1939. It has that direct link. It's also a conflict that brings together belligerents using increasingly deadly weapons. The shift in technology between the early 19th century and the late 19th century is extremely visible. It's an extremely bloody war. In a sense, like the American Civil War just a few years before in the 1860s, you see really important mass casualties among conscript armies or armies of volunteers — young people. It's a war that reaches every family in France or in Germany.

Now, during that conflict, Henry Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross movement — a businessman looking for patronage — basically accidentally bumped into a slaughterhouse, which was the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino. The Battle of Solferino was an extremely bloody battle, and the Swiss gentleman actually encountered suffering on a massive scale and became aware of the inadequacy of the military services to look after those young wounded bodies.

And there is a very strong emotional content to his book A Memory of Solferino, which really brought into a new light, if you want, what it is to actually wage war in Europe in the modern age.

That's the fundamental point about the book: it actually says you don't have to be just witnessing or hearing about these atrocities. You can do something about them. And this mobilisation, this activism, is the novel — not entirely new, but still novel — dimension of the Red Cross movement.

And what's fascinating about this is that the Red Cross movement, which starts from almost nothing in the early 1860s, had by 1870 become a sufficiently mobilising force to bring, for the first time, the signatories of the Geneva Convention face to face with one another.

And for Henri Dunant there's a phrase he uses, which is "cold compassion". And cold compassion means essentially triage. It means that you're going to select people for aid not necessarily on the basis of the severity of their wounds, but based, for example, on their chances of survival or on the logistical capability at your disposal.

It's not a new concept in military medicine because triage was used, for example, in the Revolutionary Wars. But it is actually a concept that is democratised and popularised. And I think that makes the Franco-Prussian War and those conflicts of the 1870s a very interesting moment in the history of compassion, or the history of compassion at war.

There's a hierarchy in suffering, in humanitarian response, and even today it's very striking that, in contemporary humanitarianism, the war wounded have a particular status.

In conflicts where women are brought closer to the front, or the bodies of the wounded are taken further away from the front, this interaction between the healing women and the wounded soldier — this play, if you want, on a very Christian iconography, a kind of Pietà iconography — becomes really significant in the popularisation of what humanitarian workers are supposed to do in times of war.

It only reflects a tiny portion of what humanitarians actually do, but it's very significant in the collective unconscious, or the collective representations, of what a compassionate war is.

It represents advanced technical care in times of war. But next to it, you have the brand-new weapons that the Germans have produced, the French have produced.

What motivates many humanitarians in this early period — and even today — is not simply to heal people, but also to observe the effects of modern weaponry on human bodies. So people pay particular attention to high-velocity bullets in 1870, in the same way that today many people are thinking about the types of injuries caused by drones in the Ukrainian conflict.

There is undoubtedly an effort to gather intelligence and information from these modern conflicts.

So it's a complex picture. It's not black and white. There are many nuances of grey and many interconnections between what humanitarians intended to do and what they also delivered in terms of knowledge about modern warfare, which in the end may also serve the development of modern warfare.

Things have moved on massively, or had moved on massively, and a lot of humanitarian archives opened to researchers. They are essential on several fronts. On the one hand, they give us a picture of who did what and how organisations tried to set up responses — this "cold compassion": how was it deployed? What kinds of resources were brought into play? What kinds of political alliances were made to enable people to go and help the wounded and the sick in times of war?

But they also reveal the breadth of causes that humanitarian actors started to embrace alongside warfare. Very interestingly, this includes the use of warlike language: war against this or that, campaign against this or that, battle against tuberculosis, battle against poverty. All this militarised language became a significant part of the broader social remit of humanitarian action in that period.

All of that is best found in the archives, because humanitarian actors are fundamentally acting at a symbolic level, in the sense that most aid will not actually be delivered by humanitarian actors, but by military services or by people who are nearby.

We therefore have to relativise how little — or how much — humanitarian actors matter in times of war. We also have to understand how they align with national priorities, military priorities, and how they fundamentally become part of a much broader conversation about the nature of violence in the modern age.

What is a hospital? What is an ambulance? What is a carer? Is it enough to carry somebody's body to become a carer? Do you have to carry an emblem? Do you have to wear an armband?

There are a multitude of debates about whether flying a Red Cross flag is enough to protect you or not; whether, if someone shoots from a hospital, that hospital turns into something other than a hospital. In other words, can violence be applied to a hospital? Does it have to be proportionate violence?

These are debates that are still with us today.

Fundamentally, humanitarians are in a peculiar situation in relation to the military because the military have to give access. They have to guarantee access. They have to allow some degree of freedom for the practice of medicine, for example on the battlefield. That access is negotiated. It is always contested.

And we do not see many instances of pure neutrality.

Yet in 1965, when the Red Cross movement gathered in Vienna, they formally articulated the fundamental principles of the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement. Among those principles are humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.

These four principles would then be adopted in 2001 by the United Nations General Assembly as the fundamental principles of humanitarianism.

Yet their message is simple, and the iconography is simple. The relationship, if you want, to emotions — which is so significant in compassion — is absolutely dominant.

Now there is a paradox, if you want, between the practices, which are incredibly complex and where you need to see all the negotiations that take place — and the archives help us to understand those negotiations — and the representations, which are often more simplistic, or which tend to be more abstract, perhaps more religious, more emotional.

The misconception is to believe the propaganda.

So we need to be careful not necessarily to believe what humanitarians think they do, and instead look more closely at what they actually do.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2026