France recognises the Polish National Committee

On 20 September 1917 the French government recognised the Polish National Committee as an official Polish organisation and agreed that its seat should be Paris. France was the first Entente power to do so. The Committee, founded by Roman Dmowski in Lausanne only five weeks earlier, thereby gained what it wanted most: the status of a partner with which the Allied governments could discuss Polish affairs. The date of 20 September is given consistently by Polish and French studies. According to some Polish authors, France recognised the KNP as the sole representative of the Polish nation, but the diplomatic documents of those weeks speak more modestly of an “official Polish organisation”.

The recognition was a response to a request from the Committee itself. According to its later letters to the Americans, the KNP wished to represent Polish interests in France, Great Britain, Italy and the United States, to conduct the political affairs of the Polish army being formed in France and to take under its care the Poles who in the Entente countries were formally subjects of Russia, Germany or Austria-Hungary. Activity in Russia itself it left to the Polish Council of Interparty Union in Moscow. For Paris the most important matter was the army: the decree of 4 June had created an autonomous Polish army but had not named any Polish authority to which it could be politically subordinate. The French, however, wanted the army to remain under their command, and the Committee’s authority was for the time being symbolic.

The decision was taken in the first days of the new government of Paul Painlevé, in which foreign affairs were still directed by Alexandre Ribot, who as prime minister in June had countersigned the decree on the Polish army. It coincided with a move on the other side of the front: eight days earlier Germany and Austria-Hungary had issued the patent on the Regency Council, which announced a supreme Polish authority in occupied Warsaw. The coincidence of dates showed clearly that both sides in the war were competing for the support of the Poles, and the Committee presented itself as the voice of those who placed no hope in the Central Powers. According to Polish researchers, on the same day the National Department in Chicago, a federation of the largest organisations of American Polonia, accepted the political authority of the KNP. Dmowski could thus speak on behalf of the émigré community on both sides of the Atlantic.

The French step, not agreed with Russia, aroused distrust in Petrograd and Washington. The foreign minister of the Provisional Government, Mikhail Tereshchenko, complained to the American ambassador that France and Great Britain had merely informed him of their intention to recognise the Committee without asking his opinion. Secretary of State Robert Lansing believed that bypassing Russia in a matter that concerned it so closely might harm the whole undertaking. Nevertheless London followed Paris and on 15 October recognised the Committee as an official Polish organisation. Italy did so at the turn of October and November, and the United States, after longer hesitation, in November: on 10 November Lansing authorised the ambassador in Paris to grant formal recognition. Some studies give later, December dates.

Recognition did not make the Committee a government, did not settle Poland’s borders and did not give it authority over the army. It did, however, open the way to further efforts. The Committee gained representatives with the Allied governments, in December the Americans agreed to its office issuing Poles with certificates of nationality, and in time it obtained political direction of the army, at whose head General Józef Haller was placed by its appointment in October 1918. From September 1917 the Polish cause had its own representation in the West, opposed both to the occupiers and to the Regency Council in Warsaw.