From Tourist to Planner: Preparing for Affect in Henri Dunant’s A Memory of Solferino

Abstract

Henri Dunant visited Italy to find Napoleon III in order to make a financial appeal. Shortly after Dunant’s arrival, he witnessed the 1859 Battle of Solferino, a particularly brutal moment in the attempts to unify Italy. From witnessing the battle and the care for the wounded, Dunant wrote A Memory of Solferino to call for a peacetime organization that would better administer care for the wounded. In his appeal Dunant counts on significant affective responses from his audience, yet he emphasizes administration and planning as the way to manage and channel the overwhelming affective responses that come from war.

Notes

1. ¹I thank RR peer reviewers Michael Zerbe and Shane Borrowman, and the editor, not only for their time in reviewing this essay but also for their extensive and useful notes that significantly improved this paper.

2. ²Napoleon III of France would give Italy independence and would gain an ally along with Nice and Savoy. Napoleon sought to create a less revolutionary setting in Italy after Italian national Felice Orsini tried to kill him in 1858 (Marwil 7–9).

3. ³Difficulties in locating people led to some of the horror of Solferino. Both armies had bad intelligence, thinking that only a small part of the other army was nearby when both had around 150,000 soldiers. Heat and thunderstorms added to the battle that went for nearly sixteen hours along a fifteen-mile-long conflict zone, part of which neighbored the small town of Solferino.

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Notes on contributors

Matthew Newcomb

Matthew Newcomb is Associate Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz where he teaches rhetoric, first-year composition, and literature courses. He also coordinates the composition program. His main areas of research include argument theory, affective rhetoric, design and rhetoric, and theories of composition. His previous publications include articles in College Composition and Communication, JAC, and Kairos. He is currently working on projects relating experience design to rhetoric and on the place of composition studies in General Education curricula.