page_title: International Committee of the Red Cross archives
section_title: Early Period
hierarchical_section_title: International Committee of the Red Cross archives / History / Early Period
caption_attribution_description: English: Rue de l'Athénée 3 in Geneva, Switzerland, which housed the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from 1874 to 1914.
context_page_description: The archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross are based in Geneva and were founded in 1863 at the time of the ICRC's inception. It has the dual function to manage both current records and historical archives. The general historical archives are openly accessible to the general public up to 1975.
  Along with the ICRC Library, the archives are widely considered to be the greatest repository for records on International Humanitarian Law. They have been dubbed by some researchers as "the storehouses of sorrow", since they preserve the memory of many millions of victims of armed conflicts as
  "a legacy for mankind".
context_section_description: The ICRC - or rather its predecessor - was founded in February 1863 at the "Ancient Casino" in the Rue de L'Evêche 3 of Geneva's Old Town by five men: businessman-turned-activist Henry Dunant, who had laid out the basic ideas in his much-acclaimed book A Memory of Solferino; lawyer and philanthropist Gustave Moynier; the medical doctors Louis Appia and Théodor Maunoir; and the General Guillaume Henri Dufour. 
  
  At the same moment, its archives came into being:
  "Dunant, as secretary, signed off the minutes of the first meeting of the International Committee for Relief to the Wounded, the precursor of the ICRC. Still unaware of what would follow but hopeful that Dunant’s vision would bear fruit, the young Committee preserved this document and the ones that followed in order to account for their decisions and actions."
  The actual address of the newly-founded Red Cross - and thus probably of its fledgling archives - became Dunant's private residence, the third floor of his family's "Maison Diodati" in the Old Town at Rue du Puits-Saint-Pierre 4. It remained there for the first few years. However, as Dunant's colonial businesses in Algeria collapsed, he declared bankruptcy in 1867 and was pushed out of the ICRC by its president Moynier in the following year. It may be assumed that Dunant's ICRC-related records were transfered to Moynier's splendid city residence in Rue de l'Athénée No. 8 at first.
  In the first half of the 1870s, the ICRC moved into an apartment of a building at Rue de l'Athénée No. 3, just across the street from Moynier's private residence. While it was a very representative address, the office spaces were still rather modest with just three rooms. Likewise, the archives and the library moved into the new Bureau. 
  During those early years, the archives collected information from various conflicts, especially the 1864 Second Schleswig War between the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire on the one hand side, and the Kingdom of Denmark on the other, followed by the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). 
  Subsequently, the ICRC archives took over the archival holdings of the Basel Agency with some twelve linear meters of records about prisoners of wars (PoW) from the latter war and of the Trieste Agency with one linear meter of files on PoW from the Great Eastern Crisis in the Balkans between the Russian and Ottoman Empires and their respective allies (1875-1878).
  A main focus was the collection of information about the implementation of IHL, particularly with regard to the First Geneva Convention of 1864. However, the primary task of the archives was to record diplomatic correspondence in order to account for the institution's humanitarian mandate.
  In the following decades the archives kept on documenting the evolution of the Red Cross movement. However, those oldest holdings covering more than half a century - the Ancien Fonds - still only amounted to rather modest eight linear meters.
caption: Rue de l'Athénée 3
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