Poland celebrates 11 November because on that day in 1918, as the Armistice silenced the Western Front, the Regency Council in Warsaw handed military command to Józef Piłsudski. On 14 November it dissolved itself and placed all its authority in his hands. Created under German and Austrian occupation in 1917, the council became the bridge to an independent state.
The Regency Council (Rada Regencyjna) was the highest Polish authority in the Kingdom of Poland, the state that the emperors of Germany and Austria-Hungary announced on 5 November 1916 in the lands of the former Russian partition, which their armies had occupied in 1915. An imperial patent of 12 September 1917 gave it "supreme state authority in the Kingdom of Poland" until a king or a regent took office, without prejudice to the position of the occupying powers. It sat in Warsaw from 27 October 1917 to 14 November 1918.1
For most of its life the council governed little. Its importance came at the end. In October 1918 the three regents broke with the powers that had appointed them, and in November they handed the state they had been building to Józef Piłsudski. This page follows that road, from the occupation to the handover of 11 and 14 November, and it is part of our guide to Polish independence, 1914 to 1921. For the holiday itself, from the 1937 law to its restoration in 1989, see Polish Independence Day.
How did the Regency Council come about?
The idea started in Warsaw's German headquarters. Hans Hartwig von Beseler, the German Governor-General in Warsaw from 1915, answered only to the Kaiser and pressed Berlin to restore a Polish state in Central Europe under German control, with its foreign and military policy in German hands. The historian Jesse Kauffman describes him as instrumental in persuading the Central Powers to issue their declaration of 5 November 1916. Austria-Hungary ran the southeastern part of the occupied kingdom from its own government-general in Lublin.2
The motive was military as much as political. The German Historical Museum notes that Berlin and Vienna hoped the new "Kingdom of Poland" would help them recruit Polish soldiers for their armies, and that it did not satisfy Polish hopes for a sovereign state. Stephan Lehnstaedt of the German Historical Institute in Warsaw adds that neither empire was willing to share power, so the Polish bodies they set up remained without much influence.3
The first of those bodies was the Provisional Council of State (Tymczasowa Rada Stanu), an advisory council created by the two occupying powers. Jan Snopko dates its formal existence from 14 January to 25 August 1917 and notes that, for all its limited powers, it prepared the staff and organization of the main branches of a state administration. Józef Piłsudski joined it and led its military commission.4
The partnership broke over the army. In April 1917 the Polish Legions were placed under Beseler's command, and in July their soldiers from the Kingdom were ordered to swear an oath that bound them to the two emperors. Piłsudski forbade it. He had resigned from the council on 2 July, and on 22 July 1917 the Germans arrested him in Warsaw together with his chief of staff Kazimierz Sosnkowski. He was held in the fortress of Magdeburg until November 1918. Most Legion units refused the oath and were disbanded or interned.5
The occupiers answered with a regency. On 12 September 1917, on the orders of both emperors, the German and Austro-Hungarian governors-general in Warsaw and Lublin issued a patent establishing state authority in the Kingdom of Poland. Their covering letter said that the emperors had ordered it after considering proposals the Provisional Council of State had made on 3 July 1917.6
Who were the members of the Regency Council?
The patent created a council of three, to be installed by the monarchs of the occupying powers. The three were Aleksander Kakowski, Archbishop of Warsaw, Prince Zdzisław Lubomirski, the president (mayor) of Warsaw, and Józef Ostrowski. An American diplomatic dispatch of November 1917 forwarded a Polish National Committee report naming the same three under Article 1 of the patent.7
Włodzimierz Suleja, a historian writing for the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), sketches the three. Kakowski had kept away from politics and took the office only after the bishops approved and the Pope gave permission, and many Poles saw in it the old tradition of the primate acting as interrex. Ostrowski, honorary president of the conservative Party of Real Politics, was 67 and so ill that he could hardly serve. Lubomirski, popular in the capital, believed that building the framework of a Polish state was a vital necessity for the country.8
They took office on 27 October 1917. The ceremony began with a mass and their oath in St John's Cathedral in Warsaw and ended at the Royal Castle, where they proclaimed that they had assumed supreme authority in the kingdom. Winnicki notes that the governors-general Beseler and Stanisław Szeptycki attended, with delegates of almost every Polish party and of Galicia and Greater Poland.9
Suleja writes that almost all Polish parties greeted the council kindly or at least expectantly, except the Marxist SDKPiL and PPS-Left. Its opponents in the West saw it differently. The report sent from Paris to Washington judged that the acts of 12 September made very little impression on Poles in the kingdom.10
What could the Regency Council do under German occupation?
Not much, and the patent said so. In fields not yet handed to Polish authority, bills could reach the Council of State only with the consent of the occupying powers. Polish laws that created rights or duties for the population had to be shown to the governor-general, who could object within 14 days, and he kept the right to issue his own decrees for military needs. International representation was reserved until the occupation ended.11
In practice Polish authority covered mainly the courts and the schools. The council's first government, under Jan Kucharzewski, took office in December 1917.12
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk broke that cabinet. Signed on 9 February 1918 between the Central Powers and the Ukrainian People's Republic, it gave the Chełm region to Ukraine, and on 12 February the Kucharzewski government resigned in protest. The regents issued their own condemnation and drew a new source for their authority: the will of the nation. A new government under Jan Kanty Steczkowski took office on 4 April 1918.13
Seen from Kyiv, the same treaty was a recognition of Ukrainian independence. The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine notes that the Central Powers recognized the independence and sovereignty of the Ukrainian People's Republic and had already conceded in January that the Chełm region and Podlachia should belong to it.14
A law of 4 February 1918 created the Council of State of the Kingdom of Poland, a chamber of 110 members: 12 by right of office, 55 elected and 43 appointed by the regents.15
The historian Jacek Goclon concludes that, for all their limits, these cabinets built the beginnings of a regular Polish administration and trained its officials. Their records, kept mainly in the files of the council's Civil Cabinet, are today in the Central Archives of Modern Records (AAN) in Warsaw. The archivist Włodzimierz Janowski notes that this collection survived World War II complete, unlike most of the archive's holdings.16
What did the Regency Council declare on 7 October 1918?
By the autumn of 1918 the Central Powers were facing defeat. On 7 October the regents issued a proclamation "To the Polish Nation". "The great hour, for which the whole Polish nation has waited with longing, is now striking," it began.17
Standing on the peace principles of the President of the United States, "now accepted by the whole world", the regents called for an independent state embracing all Polish lands, with access to the sea, with political and economic independence and with territorial integrity guaranteed by international treaties. They dissolved the Council of State, promised a government drawn from the broadest sections of the nation, ordered an electoral law within a month and a Sejm to which they would hand their authority. The text ended with the words "a united, independent Poland".18
Suleja calls the proclamation tantamount to a coup d'état aimed at the occupation authorities. Zdzisław Julian Winnicki, the historian of the council's institutions, also speaks of a coup against the order of the 1917 patent: from this day the council drew its authority from the nation, not from the emperors.19
Decrees followed. On 12 October the council introduced a new oath for the Polish Army, sworn to the fatherland, the Polish state and the Regency Council as provisional holder of the future supreme authority, and placed the sworn troops under its own command. On 15 October it took the power to issue decrees with the force of law until a constituent Sejm met.20
On 23 October the regents entrusted a new government to Józef Świeżyński, a National Democrat. Goclon notes that it tried to distance itself even from the regents who had appointed it. On 3 November, Suleja writes, its ministers moved to renounce obedience to the council, but the regents stood firm and dismissed the cabinet. A caretaker body under Władysław Wróblewski took over.21
Who else claimed to govern Poland in autumn 1918?
Warsaw was not the only center. On 28 October the Polish Liquidation Commission was set up in Kraków to take over Galicia from Austria, and it did not intend to submit to the Regency Council.22
In the Austrian zone the regents' government had prepared its own takeover, and at the start of November the Austro-Hungarian governor-general in Lublin handed the administration to the council's commissioner, Juliusz Zdanowski. In the night of 6 to 7 November, however, leaders of the independence left proclaimed in Lublin the Provisional People's Government of the Polish Republic under the socialist Ignacy Daszyński. Once Piłsudski returned, that government submitted to him.23
Abroad, the Polish National Committee of Roman Dmowski in Paris declined to place itself under the council's authority. Dmowski later wrote that he did not hold it against anyone who had helped organize the institutions the occupiers allowed, or worked in the administration under occupation, if they did it for the benefit of the Polish population.24
For the war with the Ukrainians that broke out in the same weeks, see the Polish-Ukrainian War and the defense of Lwów.
What happened when Piłsudski returned on 10 November?
On 8 November Piłsudski was released from Magdeburg, and on the morning of 10 November he arrived by train at the Vienna station in Warsaw. A small group of the Polish Military Organization (POW) under its commander Adam Koc met him, together with Prince Lubomirski for the Regency Council.25
That evening the disarming of the German garrison began. Political rallies gave way to actions that took weapons from German soldiers and seized key points of the city, a story told in our page on the Polish Military Organization. Kauffman notes that Polish insurgents disarmed the occupiers and expelled them, and that Beseler fled to Germany, which later brought accusations of desertion.26
The occupation collapsed from within. Winnicki writes that the Warsaw garrison declared itself neutral and that Beseler left the kingdom almost secretly, by night, fleeing, as the historian Arkadiusz Stempin puts it, the revolt of his own soldiers. Suleja writes that Piłsudski came to an understanding with the German soldiers' council on the evacuation of the occupation troops, and Winnicki adds that the Wróblewski cabinet signed an agreement with the German command for a Polish takeover of the whole government-general.27
What happened on 11 November 1918?
On 11 November the regents issued a short proclamation. "In view of the threatening external and internal danger, to unify all military administration and to maintain order in the country," it read, "the Regency Council hands over military authority and supreme command of the Polish troops subordinate to it to Brigadier Józef Piłsudski."28
The act was a division of power, not yet a transfer of the state. Once a national government was formed, the regents would hand it supreme state authority, and Piłsudski undertook to hand that government his military power, "which is part of supreme state authority". He confirmed it with his signature below those of Kakowski, Lubomirski and Ostrowski.29
The same day the Armistice ended the fighting of World War I on the Western Front. The German Historical Museum dates Poland's independence to that very day, and Stephan Lehnstaedt writes that German rule in Poland ended on 11 November 1918.30
The regents also entrusted Piłsudski with forming a national government, and on 12 November he received representatives of the parties to consult them on it.31
Why did the Regency Council dissolve on 14 November?
The shared arrangement lasted three days. On 14 November the regents wrote to Piłsudski: "The transitional state of division of supreme state authority, established by the proclamation of 11 November 1918, cannot last without harm to the emerging Polish state. This authority should be unified." They dissolved the council and placed "our duties and responsibility toward the Polish nation" in his hands, to be passed to a national government.32
Kakowski later explained that the political situation, above all the council's unpopularity, had convinced the regents that divided power was harmful to Poland. Goclon reads the decision as realism: even sharing power with Piłsudski, the regents could not have kept their position.33
The same day Piłsudski appointed Ignacy Daszyński, the head of the Lublin government, prime minister. Daszyński did not head the new cabinet, however: the first government of independent Poland was formed by another socialist, Jędrzej Moraczewski, and took office on 18 November.34
On 22 November Piłsudski signed, with Moraczewski's countersignature, the decree on the supreme representative authority of the Polish Republic. It made him Provisional Chief of State until a constituent Sejm met.35
Collaboration or a bridge? How historians judge the Regency Council
Contemporaries were divided. The independence left built a rival government in Lublin, while Dmowski, whose committee worked with the Allies, called the council an organ appointed by the Germans and existing under their protection, on which Polish policy in the war could not depend.36
Historians since have stressed what it built. Goclon credits the Kucharzewski cabinet with the practical experience in running a council of ministers that its successors used, and with many draft laws for the new state. Winnicki concludes that after 7 October the council broke out of the imperial acts and moved the Polish institutions toward full sovereignty, and that the administration it created kept working after 14 November under new political conditions.37
On the German side the reckoning was bitter. Kauffman writes that Beseler was later accused of being too accommodating to the Poles once the Treaty of Versailles gave parts of Germany's borderlands to Poland, but that his conduct stands in stark contrast to the National Socialist rulers of Poland a generation later. Arkadiusz Stempin adds that German nationalists accused him of cowardice for his flight, and that he died in 1921 convinced the empire had wasted the chance of a German-Polish alliance.38
Why does Poland celebrate Independence Day on 11 November?
Because the handover of military command on 11 November 1918 coincided with the end of World War I. A law of 23 April 1937 made 11 November the Independence Holiday, "as the anniversary of the Polish Nation's recovery of independent statehood". The full history of the holiday is told on our Polish Independence Day page, and the wars for the new borders in the battles that won Polish independence.39
