English: In 1887, Henry Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross, settled in Heiden (Switzerland), where he lived quietly and devoted himself to religious devotion and contemplation. He assiduously reread the Bible – he was especially fascinated by the Book of Daniel and the Apocalypse – and felt himself to be invested with a spiritual mission. He undertook to explain his prophetic understanding of history in four large didactic diagrams. His views were based largely on the ideas of the pastor Louis Gaussen (1790–1863), an influential figure of the Protestant Awakening in Geneva, who advocated a direct relationship between believers and God. Dunant spent considerable time on the drawings, organising the symbolic elements according to a strict logic, making preparatory sketches and painstakingly incorporating drawings and colourings into his chronology. Through these depictions of the history of prophetic and apocalyptic salvation, the founder of the Red Cross outlined his vision of a better world. The diagrams summarized all his universal ideas and marshalled them as proof of the worsening scourge of militarism and the coming final cataclysm. At that time, Dunant was convinced that the apocalypse was imminent.