Act of 5 November

On Sunday 5 November 1916, at noon precisely, the Governor-General of Warsaw, Hans Hartwig von Beseler, mounted a dais in the Great Hall of the Royal Castle in Warsaw and, in the name of Emperor Wilhelm II, read out in German the manifesto of the two monarchs. At the same time in Lublin the Austro-Hungarian Governor-General Karl Kuk proclaimed the same text in the name of Emperor Franz Joseph I. Germany and Austria-Hungary announced that from the lands of the Kingdom of Poland, taken from Russia by their armies, they would create “an independent state with a hereditary monarchy and a constitutional system”. For the first time since the partitions, great powers had officially promised the Poles a state of their own. The document went down in history as the Act of 5 November.

What was promised

The manifesto was short. The emperors, “filled with unshakeable confidence in the final victory of their arms”, had resolved to “lead to a happy future” the Polish lands “wrested from Russian rule”. The new Kingdom of Poland was to find “in union with both allied powers the guarantee needed for the free development of its forces”. It was to have its own army, in which “the glorious traditions of the Polish armies of former times and the memory of the valiant Polish comrades-in-arms” of the present war “will continue to live”, but its organisation, training and command were to be settled “by mutual agreement”. Finally, the manifesto declared that the great powers bordering the Kingdom on the west “will see with joy on their eastern borders the rebirth and flourishing of a free, happy” state.

Just as important was what the text left out. The new state was called “independent” in the sense of self-governing (samodzielne), not sovereign (niepodległe). It had no king, no government and no constitution. A single sentence disposed of the question of territory: “The more precise determination of the borders of the Kingdom of Poland is reserved.” The manifesto concerned only the former Congress Kingdom, occupied by the Germans and Austrians since the summer of 1915. It said nothing of the Polish lands of the Prussian and Austrian partitions. According to a German politician quoted at the time by the New York Times correspondent in Berlin, the state itself, its king and its national army were to come into being only after the conclusion of peace. Until then power remained with the two governors-general: Beseler in the Government-General of Warsaw and Kuk in the Austro-Hungarian Military Government-General based in Lublin.

The ceremony at the Castle

The Royal Castle, Beseler’s seat since the autumn of 1915, was decorated with Polish flags for the first time since 1831. According to a Berlin account reprinted by the American monthly Current History, the ceremony was brief and simple. Beseler appeared wearing the orders he had received for the capture of Antwerp and the Polish fortresses. After him, the Polish translation of the manifesto was read by Count Bogdan Hutten-Czapski, a Pole in German service. Gathered in the hall were members of the City Council elected in the summer, professors, the clergy led by the Archbishop of Warsaw, Aleksander Kakowski, the chief rabbi, representatives of the aristocracy with Prince Zdzisław Lubomirski, the president of Warsaw, a student delegation with banners and a handful of veterans of the January Uprising. Among the German and Austrian officers stood a group of officers of the Polish Legions in grey uniforms.

Thanks were offered on behalf of those present by the rector of the University of Warsaw, Józef Brudziński, who at the end of October had been a member of the Polish delegation received in Berlin by the Emperor and the Chancellor. He assured them that the Poles would prove worthy of the freedom given to them and asked that, to begin with, a regent be appointed for the Kingdom, since the time had not yet come to choose a king. Beseler replied that in Poland there was no room for doubt about the future, and that the task of Germans and Poles now was to bring the war to victory together. He added that he hoped soon to see a Polish army fighting alongside the Central Powers.

In Lublin Kuk read the manifesto in the governor-general’s palace, in the presence of the clergy, representatives of Polish associations and local notables. He declared that the allied monarchs solemnly guaranteed the restoration of the Kingdom of Poland, a fact that could no longer be undone, and ended with a cheer for Poland shouted in Polish. The Polish flag was hoisted in front of the palace and Austro-Hungarian troops paid it honours. Two aircraft dropped small Polish flags over the city, and Polish colours were hung on public buildings beside the Austro-Hungarian ones.

Why now

Since the capture of Warsaw the two occupiers had quarrelled over the future of the Kingdom. Vienna wanted to annex it to the Habsburg monarchy and join it with Galicia in the so-called Austro-Polish solution. Berlin would not agree. In a series of memoranda in 1915–1916 Beseler argued for the creation of a Polish state bound to Germany, with a Polish army at the Reich’s side. German military leaders had long treated the Kingdom, moreover, as a bargaining chip that could be handed back to Russia in the event of a separate peace.

The year 1916 changed the calculation. The Central Powers suffered enormous losses at Verdun and on the Somme, and the Brusilov offensive shattered a large part of the Austro-Hungarian army. At the end of August Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff took over the German Supreme Army Command. Ludendorff, impressed by the performance of the Legions at the Battle of Kostiuchnówka in July 1916, demanded the swift creation of a Polish state dependent on Germany, since only such a state could give the Central Powers Polish recruits. The Kingdom’s manpower reserves were then estimated at up to a million soldiers. At the same time the German military were thinking of annexation. As early as August the Supreme Army Command proposed annexing to Prussia a border strip along the western borders of the Kingdom.

Austria-Hungary, increasingly dependent on German military help, had to give way. The Foreign Minister István Burián and the Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg had agreed on the principle of creating the Kingdom back in the summer, and in October, at a conference in Pless, where the German headquarters was located, it was decided that the manifesto would be proclaimed without further delay. Vienna wanted at least to mark its position towards the Poles in Galicia. Almost simultaneously with the manifesto, a handwritten letter from Franz Joseph dated 4 November was published, addressed to the Austrian Prime Minister Ernest von Koerber, appointed a few days earlier. Recalling Galicia’s loyalty and its heavy sacrifices in defending the monarchy’s eastern borders, the Emperor announced that when the new state came into being he would grant Galicia the right to manage its own affairs, that is, wider autonomy (PL) than before, within the limits allowed by its belonging to Austria. The Prime Minister was to prepare the necessary bills.

Recruitment instead of a government

The real purpose of the act came out very quickly. On 9 November Beseler and Kuk issued a joint proclamation declaring that the gravity of the wartime moment obliged them to keep the administration of the new state in their own hands for the time being. The Poles were to receive state institutions gradually, and the most important of them was to be the army. The governors called on the inhabitants of the Kingdom to come forward as volunteers to fight against Russia alongside the Central Powers, following the example of the Legions. The call to arms, issued before any Polish government had been formed, caused indignation and confirmed fears that what mattered above all was the Polish soldier and Polish labour. Few volunteers came forward.

The Poles and the act

Reactions were divided. Supporters of cooperation with the Central Powers, including those gathered around Władysław Studnicki, hailed the manifesto as a breakthrough. Patriotic processions were held in Warsaw. Many Poles, however, received the act coolly or with mistrust. The National Democracy camp, whose leader Roman Dmowski was working in the West, rejected any cooperation with Germany and counted on an Entente victory. National activists in Prussian Silesia regarded the proclamation as a sham. The historian Tomasz Schramm notes that within a week the initial optimism had given way to disappointment.

Józef Piłsudski was no longer in the army by then. In July, after the fighting in Volhynia, he had demanded his discharge in protest at the treatment of the Legions, and at the end of September the Austrians accepted his resignation. In September the Legions were renamed the Polish Auxiliary Corps. Piłsudski did not reject the act, but on 6 November, in a letter to Rector Brudziński, he warned that creating an army without a Polish government made no sense. The Polish Military Organisation linked with him and the pro-independence groups took the same position: first a Polish authority, then a Polish army.

Russia and the Entente

The act was aimed at Russia, which since the proclamation of Grand Duke Nicholas of August 1914 had promised the Poles unification under the Tsar’s sceptre but had not fulfilled even its promise of autonomy. As recently as July 1916 the dispute over Polish autonomy had cost Foreign Minister Sazonov his post; he had warned that the Central Powers would themselves proclaim some form of Polish statehood. Now this had happened. The Russian government protested on 15 November, calling the proclamation “worthless” and a flagrant breach of international law, which forbids forcing the population of an occupied country to fight against its own fatherland. It recalled at the same time that it intended itself to create a Kingdom of Poland from all the Polish lands. The next day a similar protest was issued by the Allied conference in Paris, and the prime ministers of Britain, France and Italy assured Russia of their solidarity in telegrams to Prime Minister Boris Stürmer.

The Allies, however, began to press Petrograd to counter the German promise with one of its own. On 2 December the new Prime Minister, Alexander Trepov, declared in the Duma that the whole of Poland within its ethnographic borders would be free, albeit in indissoluble union with Russia, and on 25 December (12 December by the Julian calendar), in an order to the army and navy, the Tsar listed among the aims of the war the creation of a free Poland from all three partitions. In January 1917 President Woodrow Wilson spoke in the Senate in favour of a united and independent Poland.

Significance

The Act of 5 November itself gave the Poles little: it promised a state without borders, ruler or government, dependent on the two occupiers and created above all to supply them with soldiers. Even so, historians regard it as one of the turning points on the road to independence. The Polish question ceased to be an internal matter for Russia and became an international issue on which both sides in the war began to bid against each other. The occupiers also had to give the Kingdom at least the beginnings of Polish institutions. On 6 December 1916 they proclaimed an ordinance on the Provisional Council of State, which met in mid-January 1917, and in the autumn of 1917 they established the Regency Council. It was the Regency Council, which grew out of the Act of 5 November, that in November 1918 handed power to Piłsudski in the reborn independent state.