Versailles declaration

On 3 June 1918 at Versailles the prime ministers of the three European Entente powers, Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George and Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, agreed at the close of the Supreme War Council’s session on two short political declarations. The first concerned Poland. In Polish translation (the translations differ slightly from one another) it read: “The creation of a united and independent Polish state with free access to the sea constitutes one of the conditions of a solid and just peace and of the rule of right in Europe”. The second expressed sympathy for the national aspirations towards freedom of the Czechoslovaks and the Yugoslavs. For the first time France, Britain and Italy jointly and publicly included the restoration of a united Poland among the conditions of the future peace. Roman Dmowski later regarded this act as the greatest success of his diplomacy.

A conference in days of crisis

The Supreme War Council, which since its first session in December 1917 had met at the Trianon Palace hotel in Versailles, was meeting this time, from 1 June, in the worst situation for a long while. On 27 May the Germans had broken through the front on the Aisne, and on 31 May they reached the Marne at Château-Thierry, less than a hundred kilometres from Paris. Most of the time was therefore taken up by military matters: reserves, supplies and above all the pace at which American troops were being shipped over. According to the memoirs of General John Pershing, the three prime ministers then signed a joint letter to President Wilson warning that the war might be lost if the Allied reserves were exhausted before the German ones, and asking for an army of a hundred divisions.

The political declarations were drawn up on the margins of these talks. The United States did not sign them. Formally it was not an ally of the Entente but an “associated power”, and Washington had already objected to joint political statements issued in the name of the whole Council. The American liaison diplomat to the Council, Arthur Hugh Frazier, informed the State Department on 4 June that both texts would appear in the morning papers on Thursday, that is 6 June, with a clear indication that they came from the three prime ministers present at Versailles.

The road to the declaration

As long as tsarist Russia regarded the Polish question as its internal affair, the Western powers avoided binding words on it. The situation changed after the February Revolution. In April 1917 London, Paris and Rome assured the Provisional Government of their support for an independent and united Poland, and in the autumn they recognised the Polish National Committee, which Dmowski had founded in August in Lausanne and moved to Paris. Since June 1917 there had also been a Polish Army in France. In January 1918 Lloyd George called an independent Poland an urgent necessity for the stability of Europe, and President Woodrow Wilson demanded its creation in the thirteenth of his Fourteen Points. On 18 March the Entente prime ministers and ministers rejected the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and warned against a “fourth partition” of Poland, but mentioned neither its unification nor its borders.

The Polish National Committee pressed for more. Dmowski sought to link the participation of Polish troops in the fighting on the Western Front with clear political commitments from the Allies. The enemy themselves supplied the arguments. Under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Ukraine the Central Powers had promised it the Chełm Land, and in the occupied Kingdom they were still trying to build a state tied to Berlin and Vienna on the basis of the Act of 5 November. In April a delegation of the Committee took part in the congress of the oppressed nationalities of Austria-Hungary in Rome. According to some historians, the prime ministers’ decision was also influenced by the wish to encourage American Poles and Polish prisoners from the German and Austro-Hungarian armies to join the Polish army in France.

What the declaration said

The Versailles formula went further than Wilson’s words. The president had spoken of a state on territories inhabited by “indisputably Polish” populations, whose independence was to be guaranteed by international covenant. The prime ministers’ declaration spoke of a “united” and “independent” Poland with free access to the sea, without restricting it to ethnically Polish lands. Polish commentators read the word “united” as heralding the union of the lands of all three partitions, and thus the undoing of the effects of the partitions. It was also important that the settlement of the Polish question was recognised as a condition of peace, not merely as a wish.

The declaration, however, said nothing about the borders of the future state. It did not explain which lands the unification was to cover or what the access to the sea was to look like. All this was left to the peace conference, and the disputes over Poland’s western and eastern borders were to return with full force after the war.

Czechoslovaks and Yugoslavs

The second declaration was far more cautious. In it the Allied governments noted “with pleasure” the statement of the American Secretary of State Robert Lansing and associated themselves with the expression of “earnest sympathy” for the national aspirations towards freedom of the Czechoslovaks and Yugoslavs. Lansing had announced on 29 May that the United States had followed with great interest the proceedings of the April congress in Rome, and that the aspirations of both peoples had Washington’s earnest sympathy. Independence was not mentioned either in the American statement or in the Versailles one.

The caution was largely the work of Italy. As late as mid-May the Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino told the American ambassador in Rome that new declarations widening the war aims were inadvisable. He distinguished between the Czechoslovaks, who were worth encouraging, and the Yugoslavs. He regarded their state, united with Serbia, as a future rival of Italy on the Adriatic, and the Yugoslavs themselves as divided. The Yugoslavs read the difference without difficulty. On 9 June the chairman of the Yugoslav Committee, Ante Trumbić, complained to the American ambassador that the declarations clearly separated the Polish question from the Yugoslav one. A few days later the Serbian minister in Washington wrote to the ambassadors of the three powers that the Versailles wording had taken the Czechoslovaks and Yugoslavs by surprise, and that the Austrian press had used it in its propaganda.

Reactions

In the occupied Kingdom of Poland the press, subject to wartime censorship, played down the significance of the declaration. According to Polish studies, the German side replied that the Central Powers would themselves decide Poland’s fate in agreement with its lawful representatives, and the government of Jan Kanty Steczkowski, at the demand of Governor-General Hans von Beseler, declared in mid-June that the Versailles resolution would not change its co-operation with the Central Powers. For the Polish National Committee, by contrast, the declaration was proof that linking the Polish cause with Entente policy bore fruit. In September the Committee obtained political authority over the Polish army in France, and in October Britain and Italy recognised it as an autonomous, allied and co-belligerent army.

Significance

The declaration did not create a state or fix its borders, but it was a political commitment by three powers that would have been hard to disown later. When in October 1918 the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote to the Polish National Committee, he recalled that Britain had gladly associated itself with the Versailles declaration of the great powers of 3 June. After the Entente’s victory the declaration, together with Wilson’s Fourteen Points, became the starting point of the discussions on Poland at the peace conference.

In collective memory, however, the Versailles declaration gave way to Wilson’s address. Some historians call it the forgotten founding act of the Second Polish Republic and explain this partly by the fact that in the interwar years Piłsudski’s camp was not inclined to recall a success of the National Democrats. Yet in June 1918 the outcome of the war was by no means settled. The Germans stood on the Marne, and the prime ministers who made the promise to Poland were in those same days pressing the Americans for soldiers.