Polish National Committee founded

On 15 August 1917, in Lausanne in Switzerland, a group of Polish politicians set up the Polish National Committee (KNP). Its president was Roman Dmowski, leader of National Democracy, who since 1915 had been seeking support in the West for the Polish cause. The committee was to be the Polish political representation in the Entente countries and, as Dmowski hoped, the nucleus of a future government of a restored Poland. It soon moved to Paris and within a few months won recognition from the Western powers.

The road to Lausanne

Dmowski had long been contemplating such a committee. According to Polish historians, he took the first steps at the turn of January and February 1917 during a meeting in Lausanne. He then wrote to his associates in the homeland that he intended to set up a committee, and asked that each of the three partitions nominate at least one candidate. As long as Tsarist Russia was in power, however, the Western powers treated the Polish question as an internal matter of their ally and could not recognise any Polish representation without Petrograd’s consent.

The breakthrough came with the February Revolution. On 30 March the Russian Provisional Government recognised the Poles’ right to an independent state, and the Western powers soon adopted this position. On 4 June France agreed to the creation of an autonomous Polish army. The Poles on the Entente side thus already had an army being organised, but no body that could speak in their name and exercise political authority over that army. In July Dmowski circulated to Western politicians a memorandum, “Problems of Central and Eastern Europe”, in which he set out the territorial programme of the future Poland.

What was happening in the homeland also mattered. The camp of cooperation with the Central Powers was in crisis: in July legionaries of the I and III Brigades refused to take the oath of brotherhood in arms with Germany, and on the night of 21–22 July the Germans arrested Józef Piłsudski. For supporters of the pro-Entente orientation this was proof that the road to independence led through the victory of the Western Allies.

The meeting in Lausanne

The committee was founded at a meeting of Polish politicians in Lausanne. According to most works, its first membership included, besides Dmowski, Count Maurycy Zamoyski, who became vice-president, the journalist Erazm Piltz (PL), the Greater Poland national activist Marian Seyda, the Galician Jan Emanuel Rozwadowski (PL), and the landowners from the eastern lands Konstanty Skirmunt and Władysław Sobański (PL). The committee’s representative in the United States was Ignacy Jan Paderewski, who since the beginning of 1917 had been winning President Wilson over to the Polish cause. Sources differ on whether he was a member of the KNP from the first day or was co-opted a few weeks later. Later the committee was joined by, among others, Józef Wielowieyski (PL) and Stanisław Kozicki (PL), and, on behalf of the Polish community in America, the Buffalo physician Franciszek Fronczak (PL).

The membership was carefully balanced geographically, but not politically. Politicians of National Democracy and the conservative Party of Real Politics (PL) predominated, many of them members of the earlier Polish National Committee, which had operated in Warsaw and Petrograd since 1914. Many of them knew each other from working in the Polish Central Agency (PL), a press bureau founded in Lausanne in 1915 by Piltz, Seyda and Rozwadowski, among others. The agency now became the committee’s organ. The KNP’s authority was recognised by groups close to it in the Polish lands and, in Russia, by the Polish Council of Inter-Party Union. It included, however, no representatives of the left or of Piłsudski’s camp.

Tasks

The committee set itself three tasks: directing and representing Polish policy towards the Entente states, political authority over the Polish army being formed in France together with care for it, and consular protection of Poles living in the Allied countries. This last matter was urgent. Poles from the Prussian and Austrian partitions were formally citizens of enemy states in France, Britain and Italy, which exposed them to internment and other restrictions.

Its ambitions, however, went further. The historian Janusz Pajewski wrote that Dmowski considered his main task to be tying the Polish cause to the cause of the Western states, “but undoubtedly he also sought to transform the committee at the right moment into a government that would take power in Poland”. The KNP’s seat was Paris, the centre of the Entente’s political and military cooperation. According to Polish works, the committee first occupied rooms in the Hôtel Saint-James on the rue Saint-Honoré, and from October had its offices on the avenue Kléber.

Recognition

France was the first to recognise the KNP: on 20 September 1917 the French government accepted it as the official representation of the Polish nation. On the same day, according to Polish researchers, the National Department attached to the Polish-American relief organisation in Chicago accepted the committee’s political authority. Britain followed France’s example in mid-October, and Italy at the end of that month. For the United States sources give various dates, from November to December 1917, and some authors note that American recognition was more cautious than European. The delay was explained, among other things, by the opposition of the Russian Provisional Government, which until its fall in November looked unfavourably on a Polish representation abroad.

Recognition did not mean that the Allies accepted all the committee’s demands. The French wanted the Polish army to be subordinate to their authorities, with the KNP’s authority symbolic. Dmowski fought for a long time for political direction of the army and the right to appoint its commander. He achieved this only in the autumn of 1918, when General Józef Haller, nominated by the committee, took command of the army.

Significance

The KNP became the Western states’ main partner in Polish affairs. Its efforts contributed to the Versailles declaration (PL) of 3 June 1918, in which the prime ministers of France, Britain and Italy recognised the creation of a united and independent Poland with access to the sea as one of the conditions of a just peace. Dmowski later wrote that having an army at the side of the Allies was “our only title to the status of an allied state”, and thanks to it Poland found a place at the peace conference table on the side of the victors.

After independence was regained, the committee did not recognise the government set up in Warsaw by Piłsudski. The dispute was eased by an agreement at the beginning of 1919: representatives of the Chief of State were co-opted into the KNP, and the committee recognised the government of Ignacy Jan Paderewski (PL). Its members formed the core of the Polish delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, and the committee itself dissolved on 15 April 1919. The Treaty of Versailles was signed on behalf of Poland by Paderewski and Dmowski.