Dissolution of the Regency Council

On 14 November 1918 the three regents of the Kingdom of Poland, Archbishop Aleksander Kakowski, Prince Zdzisław Lubomirski and Józef Ostrowski, signed the act dissolving the Regency Council. They handed all the supreme authority they held to Józef Piłsudski as commander-in-chief of the Polish Armed Forces, with the obligation to hand it over to a future national government. The body set up in 1917 by Berlin and Vienna ceased to exist, and a single man stood at the head of the reviving state.

Three days earlier the regents had handed the army over to Piłsudski, and on 12 November they had entrusted him with forming a national government. They themselves kept civil authority. Such a division, however, could not last. The regents, installed in office by a patent of the occupying powers, were recognised neither by the left nor by the Lublin government, which had placed itself at Piłsudski’s disposal. On 13 November a large PPS demonstration marched through the streets of Warsaw, numbering nearly 50,000 people according to the socialists, and the demonstrators hung a red banner on the Royal Castle, the seat of the regents. The act of 14 November began with the words: “The transitional state of division of supreme state authority, established by the proclamation of 11 November 1918, cannot continue without harm to the emerging Polish State.” The regents therefore decided, “guided by the good of the Fatherland”, to dissolve the Council and to lay their duties and responsibility towards the nation in the hands of the commander-in-chief, who was to pass them on to the national government.

On the same day Piłsudski, already as de facto head of state, issued a decree of his own. In it he wrote that on his release from German captivity he had found a Poland freeing itself “in the most chaotic internal and external conditions”. After talks with representatives of almost all the parties, “taking into account the powerful currents now prevailing in the West and East of Europe”, he appointed as prime minister Ignacy Daszyński, the head of the Lublin government, who two or three days earlier had tendered his resignation to him. He demanded that Daszyński strengthen the cabinet with experts regardless of their views, and stipulated that the government was provisional and could not carry out far-reaching social changes, because these would be decided only by the Legislative Sejm, to be convened within a few months. Daszyński was also to prepare a draft of a supreme representative authority covering all three partitions. In the decree the state was no longer called a Kingdom but the Polish Republic.

Daszyński began talks with other parties, but the National Democrats did not want a socialist at the head of the government. In Warsaw the provisional government of Władysław Wróblewski (PL), the last cabinet appointed by the regents, was also still in office, conducting current business until a new government was formed. Piłsudski exercised supreme authority on the basis of the regents’ act until, by a decree of 22 November, he made himself Provisional Chief of State. Kakowski remained Archbishop of Warsaw, and the other two regents withdrew from politics for the time being.