With the first number of the Bulletin international des Societes de secours aux militaires blesses edited in Geneva in October 1869 by the International Committee of Aid to the Wounded, not yet known as the International Committee of the Red Cross, there originated a publication which in 1919 was to become the Revue internationale de la Croix-Rouge, now widespread throughout the world and in which the activities, researches and intentions of our movement are described. We are therefore celebrating both the fiftieth aniversary of the Review's founding and also the centenary of the Bulletin to which it has succeded without any interruption.

In a report which he had submitted to one of the preparatory committees for the first International Conference of National Aid Societies for the Nursing of the Sick and Wounded in the Field (which meetings were the predecessors of the International Conferences of the Red Cross) at Paris in 1867, Huber-Saladin, one of the French government delegates, put forward the idea “of a jointly financed publication in Geneva, in the form of a journal, or a periodical bulletin to which every Central Committee would contribute news items”. The International Committee, of which Gustave Moynier was president, adopted this idea and shortly afterwards, in its ninth circular of 21 September 1867, submitted it to the Central Committees which had been previously consulted and had given their approval.

Glancing through the 196 numbers of the Bulletin international des Sociétés de la Croix-Rouge certain major themes stand out significantly. Some of these were already described in its first issue of October 1869, then can be met with again throughout the years until this last number of October 1918 devoted almost entirely to wartime activities in 28 belligerent or neutral countries and to interventions on behalf of victims. The account which follows, however incomplete it may be, will at all events describe the successes, hopes and preoccupations of a decisive period in the history of our movement.

“Oh, War is not dead!” cried Henry Dunant at the end of the last century, observing with rigorous penetration that “To judge the past in the light of Holy Writ, after studying the long succession of centuries fraught with wars, is to see history as an indelible indictment of the human species”.

Under this self-explanation heading which is justified on merely reading the Table of Contents of the Revue internationale since 1919, we give extracts of some articles which have appeared in our publication over half a century. The selection may indeed be arbitrary, but its purpose is merely to show the diversity and importance of the subjects dealt with. Those years have been of capital importance and corresponded to a turning point in history all the more profound as all problems have found themselves raised anew.

Anything concerning Henry Dunant is of interest to members of the Red Cross. We are therefore particularly grateful to Mr. Paul-Emile Schazmann, for many years conservator of manuscripts at the Swiss National Library, for having made available, for the centenary issue of our Review, unpublished writings by Dunant on facts which have so far received no attention. (Ed.)

It is by now well known that on 1 August 1969 the ICRC submitted a plan to the authorities in Lagos and in the secessionist territory. On 15 August it received their agreement. Mr. Bignami, the ICRC President's personal representative in Lagos, kept in touch with the Nigerian Government whose reply reached Geneva somewhat later.

The ICRC in 1967 published a brief work of some sixty pages entitled The Principles of International Humanitarian Law, which fills a gap, as can be seen, both as regards international public law and in the Red Cross world. It is in fact a synthesis of fundamental notions, often referred to but rarely denned, the proper understanding of which is of primary importance for anyone concerned in problems of humanitarian law and especially in its application within the Red Cross.