Ire' ne Herrmann is associate professor of modern history at the University of Fribourg and lecturer of Swiss history at the University of Geneva. Daniel Palmieri is historical research officer at the ICRC. AbstractToday, war is still perceived as being the prerogative of men only. Women are generally excluded from the debate on belligerence, except as passive victims of the brutality inflicted on them by their masculine contemporaries. Yet history shows that through the ages, women have also played a role in armed hostilities, and have sometimes even been the main protagonists. In the present article, the long history and the multiple facets of women's involvement in war are recounted from two angles: women at war (participating in war) and women in war (affected by war). The merit of a genderbased division of roles in war is then examined with reference to the ancestral practice of armed violence.Since time immemorial, war has been an integral part of the history of humankind. 1 Yet this age-old activity seems to have been the preserve of only part of humankind, since war is still perceived as being essentially a male affair. Many arguments have been put forward to explain this male predominance. 'Innate violence', 'the predator instinct', or even 'the death wish', traits believed to be particularly developed in men, are said to explain their propensity to go to war. Cultural traditions which instil the cult of war into boys from an early

Résumé Fin 1918, le CICR est loué de toutes parts pour son action en faveur des prisonniers de la Grande Guerre. Au même moment est fondée la Ligue des Sociétés de la Croix-Rouge, censée promouvoir un humanitaire moderne, focalisé sur les activités de secours et de prévention en temps de paix. Entre ces deux institutions charitables s’engage une lutte parfois féroce, dont les débuts font l’objet de cet article. Au-delà des péripéties de cet affrontement, il entend aborder une question bien plus vaste, celle des rapports de concurrence subtils et variés qui peuvent se développer entre des organismes se destinant à soulager la souffrance des victimes.

Despite the recurrence of hostage-taking through the ages, the subject of hostages themselves has thus far received little analysis. Classically, there are two distinct types of hostages: voluntary hostages, as was common practice during the Ancien Régime of pre-Revolution France, when high-ranking individuals handed themselves over to benevolent jailers as guarantors for the proper execution of treaties; and involuntary hostages, whose seizure is a typical procedure in all-out war where individuals are held indiscriminately and without consideration, like living pawns, to gain a decisive military upper hand. Today the status of “hostage” is a combination of both categories taken to extremes. Though chosen for pecuniary, symbolic or political reasons, hostages are generally mistreated. They are in fact both the reflection and the favoured instrument of a major moral dichotomy: that of the increasing globalization of European and American principles and the resultant opposition to it — an opposition that plays precisely on the western adherence to human and democratic values. In the eyes of his countrymen, the hostage thus becomes the very personification of the innocent victim, a troubling and haunting image.

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