Solferino 1859: Three Monarchs, a Blind Collision and the Red Cross

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On June 24, 1859, during the Second Italian War of Independence, roughly 300,000 soldiers collided in the hills of northern Italy. Emperor Franz Joseph I led the Austrians, while Napoleon III of France and King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia led the allied army, the last time every army on a battlefield was under the personal command of its monarch. Neither side had scouted properly. Franz Joseph had reversed his army to counterattack while Napoleon III advanced, believing the Austrians were in retreat, and the two forces ran into each other around Solferino, San Martino and Medole. A French corps held a thin five-kilometer line in the south from about 4 a.m., Napoleon III committed his Imperial Guard against Solferino, and the Austrian center broke at Cavriana around 6 p.m. At San Martino the heights changed hands repeatedly until a fourth Sardinian assault at 8 p.m.

About 40,000 men were killed, wounded or missing. Shaken by the carnage, with Prussia threatening to mobilize and French Catholics protesting, Napoleon III secretly agreed the armistice of Villafranca with Franz Joseph. Piedmont gained Lombardy but not Venetia, and Count Cavour resigned in protest. The Swiss businessman Henry Dunant, passing through Castiglione delle Stiviere, used his carriage to carry wounded men to the town's church, then wrote A Memory of Solferino, proposing volunteer relief societies and a treaty protecting medics and the wounded. It led to the first Geneva Convention and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

• The Austrian emperor's chief of staff and top adjutant general were bitter rivals sabotaging each other during the campaign.
• Napoleonic shoulder-to-shoulder formations marched into rifled muskets and artillery that hit at long range.
• Local women nursed soldiers of every army under the motto tutti fratelli, all are brothers.
• A 70-meter tower built at San Martino in 1893 honors Victor Emmanuel II, while nearby ossuary chapels hold the bones of thousands of unnamed dead.
• At the 160th anniversary in 2019, Karl von Habsburg attended a reconciliation ceremony and the EU presidency recognized Solferino as the ground where humanitarian law began.