Guillaume Henri Dufour

Guillaume Henri Dufour (; 15 September 178714 July 1875) was a Swiss military officer, structural engineer and topographer. He served under Napoleon I and held the Swiss office of General four times in his career, firstly in 1847 when he led the Swiss Confederation forces to victory against the Sonderbund. In 1864 Dufour presided over the First Geneva Convention which established the International Red Cross. He was founder and president (1838 to 1865) of the Swiss Federal Office of Topography. Early life Dufour was born on 15 September 1787 in Konstanz, where his parents from Geneva were living in exile for their involvement in the Revolution of 1782. He was the son of Bénédict Dufour, a watchmaker, and Pernette Valentin. When he was two years old, his parents were allowed to return to Geneva, where Dufour attended school and studied drawing and medicine. In 1807, Dufour travelled to Paris to join the École Polytechnique, then a military academy. He studied descriptive geometry under Jean Nicolas Pierre Hachette, and graduated fifth in his class in 1809, going on to study military engineering at the École d'Application in Metz. Career In 1811, Dufour joined the French Army and was sent to help defend Corfu, in the French Ionian Islands, where he mapped the island's old fortifications. He was wounded in action in June 1813 during a naval battle against the British. By 1814, he had attained the rank of captain, and was awarded the Cross of the Légion d'Honneur for his work repairing fortifications at Lyon. In 1817, he resumed his status as a Swiss citizen, and returned to Geneva to become commander of the Canton of Geneva's military engineers, as well as a professor of mathematics at the Academy of Geneva. From 1819 to 1830 he was chief instructor in the military school of Thun, which had been founded mainly through his efforts. Among other distinguished foreign pupils he instructed Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the former Emperor. In 1827 he was raised to the rank of colonel, and commanded the Federal army in a series of field manoeuvres. In 1831 he became chief of the staff, and soon afterwards he was appointed quartermaster-general. Two years later the Federal Diet commissioned him to superintend the execution of a complete trigonometrical survey of Switzerland. He had already made a cadastral survey of the canton of Geneva, and published a map of the canton on the scale of 1⁄25000.