The “Memoires” of Henry Dunant

Extract

In our December 1969 issue we called attention to the first volume of the “Henry Dunant Institute Collection” containing “Un Souvenir de Solférino” and some of Dunant's unpublished writings under the general title “L'Avenir sanglant”. The collection has now been enriched with a new volume entitled “Mémoires” which the Henry Dunant Institute is editing in French, jointly with the Éditions de l'Age d'homme, Lausanne. The book was compiled and presented by Professor Bernard Gagnebin, Dean of the Geneva University Faculty of Arts. He undertook the selection of the manuscripts—102 exercise books—found in three boxes deposited with the Geneva University Public Library. This was a difficult and delicate task, as Professor Gagnebin himself admits in a lengthy introduction: “the Mémoires were not in the form of a continuous text but of an unfinished work. We reconstituted them from more than thirty exercise books and we divided them into thirty-four chapters”.