Declaration of the Regency Council

On 7 October 1918 in Warsaw the Regency Council of the Kingdom of Poland issued the proclamation “To the Polish Nation” (PL). It was published the same day in a special supplement of the Monitor Polski, the Kingdom’s official gazette. The regents, Archbishop Aleksander Kakowski, Józef Ostrowski and Prince Zdzisław Lubomirski, declared that they based themselves on the peace principles of the President of the United States, which in respect of Poland led “to the creation of an independent state comprising all Polish lands, with access to the sea”. They announced a government made up of representatives of all classes and political tendencies, a democratic electoral law and the convening of a Sejm, into whose hands they would lay down their authority. A body created a year earlier by Berlin and Vienna spoke for the first time in the name of an independent Poland, without asking the consent of the occupying powers.

The great hour

The proclamation was a response to the sudden change in Germany’s position. At the end of September Ludendorff had demanded that the government immediately request an armistice, and on the night of 3–4 October the new chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, appealed to President Wilson for a ceasefire and negotiations on the basis of his peace programme. The same day Austria-Hungary made a similar request. Both occupying powers had thus accepted as the basis of peace the Fourteen Points, among them the thirteenth, which promised an independent Polish state with access to the sea. For the regents this was an irrefutable argument: since the occupiers themselves had accepted Wilson’s principles, no one could accuse a Polish authority of defying their will when it invoked those principles.

The Regency Council had lived in contradiction from the start. Installed in October 1917 under a patent of the occupiers, it had sworn to work for Polish independence, yet its every step depended on the German governor-general in Warsaw and the Austro-Hungarian one in Lublin. In February 1918, after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Ukraine, it announced that from then on it exercised power “based on the will of the Nation”. In the summer its position was undermined by the affair of the secret note of Prime Minister Jan Kanty Steczkowski, who had sought in Berlin an alliance with the Central Powers. On 5 September Steczkowski stepped down and his ministers carried on in a caretaker capacity. On 22 September the task of forming a new government was accepted by Jan Kucharzewski, a former prime minister who had resigned back in February in protest against the Brest agreements. He received his appointment on 2 October, and five days later countersigned the proclamation.

Text of the proclamation

The proclamation opened with words a whole generation remembered: “The great hour, for which the whole Polish nation has longed, has struck. Peace is approaching, and with it the fulfilment of the never-lapsed aspirations of the Polish nation to complete independence.” The regents wrote that the will of the nation was “clear, firm and unanimous”, and invoked the principles proclaimed by the President of the United States, “now accepted by the whole world”. The future state was to have political and economic independence and territorial integrity, guaranteed by international treaties.

Four decisions followed from these principles. The Regency Council dissolved the Council of State (PL), an advisory and legislative body, partly elected in the spring and partly appointed by the regents. It announced the immediate formation of a government made up of representatives of “the broadest classes of the nation and political tendencies”. Within a month this government was to prepare, together with the political groups, an electoral law for the Sejm “based on broad democratic principles”. The elected Sejm was to meet without delay and decide on the further arrangement of supreme authority, into whose hands the regents, “in accordance with the oath they had sworn”, would lay down their power. The proclamation ended with a call: “Let everything that may divide us fall silent, and let one great voice ring out: a United Independent Poland.”

The words “all Polish lands” and “access to the sea” had an unmistakable meaning. They referred not only to the occupied Kingdom but also to Galicia and the lands under Prussian rule, a programme close to the Versailles declaration of the Entente powers in June. The proclamation said not a word about the Act of 5 November, the 1917 patent or the powers that had appointed the regents.

First steps

A broad-based government did not emerge at once. Kucharzewski failed to form a cabinet and resigned on 9 October. Day-to-day affairs were run by the deputy prime minister, Bohdan Broniewski (PL), with Steczkowski’s ministers. The Regency Council nonetheless began to take over the attributes of a state. On 12 October it introduced a new form of oath for the Polish Armed Forces, the small army formed until then under German command. The soldiers now swore loyalty “to the Polish State and to the Regency Council, as the provisional substitute for the future Supreme Authority of the Polish State”, and the regents announced that the army was passing under their supreme authority. By a decree of 15 October they granted themselves, until the Sejm was convened, the right to issue ordinances with the force of law. Governor-General Hans Hartwig von Beseler recognised the Council’s authority over the army on 18 October, and on 24 October resigned as its commander-in-chief.

The new government was formed only on 23 October. It was headed by Józef Świeżyński, and it was the first cabinet for whose approval the regents did not apply to the occupation authorities. It lasted less than two weeks. The regency survived until mid-November, when it handed power to Józef Piłsudski and dissolved itself.

Reception and significance

The proclamation was welcomed by a large part of the Polish political scene, but according to historians it did not win the regents markedly greater support. In the eyes of many Poles, especially on the left, the Council remained an institution created by the occupiers, and its members belonged to the conservative camp in a country where, after four years of war and hunger, radical moods were growing. The Entente powers regarded the Polish National Committee in Paris, not the authorities in Warsaw, as Poland’s representative. Other centres of power soon arose in the country which did not recognise the regents’ authority.

Even so, 7 October was a turning point. For the first time since the partitions an authority operating on Polish soil publicly declared that its aim was full independence and the unification of all Polish lands, and began building a state without looking to Berlin and Vienna. The National Democrat Stanisław Głąbiński observed that only in October did they bring themselves to act independently of the occupiers. In the interwar period right-wing and conservative circles proposed the day of the proclamation, or of the takeover of the army, as the proper date of the recovery of independence, in contrast to 11 November. Today it is mainly monarchist circles that invoke this tradition.