Renée Bordier

Their forefather Guillaume Bordier, a French protestant, originated from the Orléans region and fled in 1541 to the Calvinist republic of Geneva due to the religious persecution which arose in France after the 1534 Affair of the Placards.

In 1571, the family obtained Genevan citizenship.

Its members were at first active in the Fustian and Serge cloth trade, but later turned to gold-smithing and jewelry-making.

Many of them became politicians, scientists, pastors, and army officers, respectively.

Like most of her colleagues, both female and male, Bordier was connected to the ICRC through elder relatives: her uncle Guillaume Pictet (1860-1926), a banker from Geneva's oldest family, had been a member of the ICRC from 1919 until 1921.

In 1871, Renée Bordier's paternal grandfather Ami Bordier (1841–1920) married Fanny Adèle Reverdin (1848-1933), the daughter of banker Jacques Reverdin, and joined Reverdin & Cie as a stockbroker.

Renée Bordier`s father Pierre Jacques (1872-1958) joined the bank as partner in 1897, as did seven years later his brother Édouard (1874-1957).

The third female member was the music educator Suzanne Ferrière (1886-1970) in 1925, followed in 1930 by the nurse Lucie Odier (1886-1984).

75 years after the founding of the ICRC, Bordier became only its fifth-ever female member after the historian and legal scholar Renée-Marguerite Cramer (1887-1963), who was elected in 1918 and succeeded in 1922 by the nurse and suffragette Pauline Chaponnière-Chaix (1850-1934).

Upon the death of his father-in-law in 1895, Ami Bordier became the chairman of the bank and renamed it Bordier & Cie.

It has remained since then an independent, international private bank specialised in wealth management for private clients.

As of 2021, it was co-owned and -managed by the fifth generation of its founders.

In 1900, Pierre married Mathilde Perrier (1874-1966), who came from another rich family.

The Bordiers traditionally resided in what was then still the village of Versoix, some 10 km north-east of the centre of Geneva on the north-west side of Lake Geneva.

Her brothers Guillaume (1901-1982), Jacques (1903-1981) and Raymond (1906-1974) joined Bordier & Cie as partners, while her sister Marie (1908-1990) became the wife of a pastor in Jussy.

Renée Bordier (1 July 1902, Geneva – 2000) was a Swiss nurse from a patrician family background.

Like many other daughters from prominent Genevan families Renée Bordier attended the Institut du Bon Secours, a nursing school which was founded in 1905 by the physician Marguerite Champendal, the first woman from Geneva to obtain her doctorate in medicine at the University of Geneva.

In 1925, Bordier graduated with a diploma as a nurse.

She at first worked in private care, then as a nurse for children in a boarding school.

For two years, she was the director of a maternity hospital and then started working again as a nurse, this time in an operating theatre.

She became a leading expert at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) for relief actions, especially during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

As only the fifth female member of the ICRC's governing body Bordier helped to pave the way towards gender equality in the organisation which itself has historically been a pioneer of international humanitarian law.

During the Second World War she was an outspoken advocate inside the ICRC leadership to publicly denounce the Holocaust by Nazi Germany through its system of extermination and concentration camps, though in vain.

The Bordiers are officially Geneva's fifth-oldest family.

In 1936, she became the chief nurse at Bon Secours.

At the ICRC, Bordier worked at first in organising relief for the victims of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

She did so in close cooperation with Odier, who hailed likewise from a prominent family of bankers (Bank Lombard Odier & Co).

During the Second World War, Bordier became the director of the ICRC service for individual aid to prisoners of war (POW).

In early 1938, the ICRC assembly voted to appoint Bordier as one of its three new members.

The election was an effort to rejuvenate the governing body of the organisation with regard to growing global tensions.

By autumn of 1942, the ICRC leadership received information about the systematic extermination of Jews by Nazi Germany in Eastern Europe, the so-called Final Solution.

A large majority of the ICRC's about two dozen members at its general assembly on 14 October 1942 – especially its four female members Frick-Cramer, Odier, Ferrière, and Bordier – was in favour of a public protest.

However, Carl Jacob Burckhardt – a professor of history at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva who went on to become the ICRC president in 1944 – and Switzerland's President Philipp Etter firmly denied that request.

In late 1944, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that it awarded the ICRC its second Nobel Peace Prize after 1917.

As in World War I, it was the only recipient during the war years.

While the then leadership of the ICRC was later sharply criticized for not publicly denouncing Nazi Germany, Bordier all the more made her distinct contribution to what the Nobel Committee credited the ICRC with, i.e."«the great work it has performed during the war on behalf of humanity.»"In 1945, Bordier was elected as president of the Association du Bon Secours, where she had graduated as a nurse two decades earlier.

As Geneva's patrician families lost their quasi-absolute control of the major public offices at the end of the 19th century, most of them got engaged in banking and philanthropic activities, including the Bordiers:

During the 19th century they owned almost half of the lands there.

Both Renée's grandfather Ami and her father held the office of the mayor of the municipality.

Renée Bordier was born the second-oldest of five children.