Roman Dmowski: the politician who signed for Poland at Versailles

Roman Dmowski spent the decisive years of Polish independence far from the battlefields. While Józef Piłsudski raised legions and then took power in Warsaw, Dmowski worked in the capitals of the Western Allies to persuade the Allies that a reborn Poland should be one of the victors of World War I. As president of the Polish National Committee he won Allied recognition for it, gave political direction to a Polish army in France, set out Poland's claims to the leaders of the Paris Peace Conference and, on 28 June 1919, signed the Treaty of Versailles for Poland together with Ignacy Jan Paderewski. He was also the founder and chief ideologue of Polish nationalism, and scholars of the period identify antisemitism as part of that program.¹

Early life and National Democracy

Dmowski was born on 9 August 1864 in Kamionek near Warsaw, now part of the city, in the part of Poland ruled by Russia. He died on 2 January 1939 at Drozdowo near Łomża.²

In 1893, with the writer Jan Ludwik Popławski and the sociologist Zygmunt Balicki, he founded the secret National League by taking over and reorganizing the older Polish League. It became the core of the movement known as National Democracy (Polish Narodowa Demokracja, or endecja). For the rest of his life he was its leader and chief theorist.³

His best known book, Thoughts of a Modern Pole (Myśli nowoczesnego Polaka), first ran in installments in the movement's journal Przegląd Wszechpolski, came out as a book in 1903 and set out the principles of modern Polish nationalism.⁴

Dmowski regarded Germany, not Russia, as the main threat to the Polish nation. He argued this in Germany, Russia and the Polish Question (1908), whose table of contents lists the heading “Główny wróg Polski” (The main enemy of Poland). From 1907 he sat in the Russian State Duma, in its Second and Third terms, and led its Polish Circle.⁵

Two roads to independence

The rivalry with Piłsudski began long before 1918. During the Russo-Japanese War Dmowski was in Tokyo from May to July 1904 and warned the Japanese authorities that a rising in Russian Poland had little chance and would bring disaster on the Poles. In July Piłsudski arrived for the Polish Socialist Party to seek Japanese support for just such a rising; his mission failed. A long private conversation between the two men in Tokyo, nine hours long according to a witness, did not bring their positions closer.⁶

The divide ran through the whole war. Piłsudski's Legions fought on the side of Austria-Hungary against Russia. Dmowski first looked for Polish unity with Russian help, then turned to the Western Allies. In his view only the defeat of Germany, won on the side of the Entente, could bring a united, independent Poland.⁷ › Józef Piłsudski: the marshal who restored Poland

The Polish National Committee, 1917

In November 1916 the German and Austrian emperors proclaimed a Kingdom of Poland on the lands taken from Russia. Dmowski was among the signatories of the Lausanne declaration, a protest against the act of 5 November 1916 that began the creation of an official Polish representation on the Allied side.⁸

On 4 June 1917 a decree of the French president, Raymond Poincaré, created an autonomous Polish army in France. To give it political leadership, Polish politicians in exile founded the Polish National Committee (Komitet Narodowy Polski, KNP) at Lausanne on 15 August 1917, with Dmowski as president. Within days the committee moved to Paris. Its members came mostly from National Democracy and the conservative Party of Real Politics; Paderewski, in the United States, later joined it.⁹

Its first aim was recognition. France recognized the committee as the official representation of Poland on 20 September 1917. Britain followed on 15 October and Italy on 30 October. In Washington the State Department authorized formal recognition on 10 November 1917, according to its own records; Polish accounts date the American recognition to the public announcement of 1 December (the IPN's Przystanek Historia) or to 6 December 1917 (dzieje.pl).¹⁰

The Allies dealt with the committee as Poland's representation, and it ran its own diplomatic apparatus for a state that did not yet exist while it lobbied for a public Allied commitment to Poland. On 3 June 1918 the prime ministers of France, Britain and Italy declared that a united and independent Polish state with free access to the sea was one of the conditions of a just and lasting peace.¹¹

The Blue Army

The Polish Army in France, known as the Blue Army or Haller's Army, was under the political authority of Dmowski's committee, while the French government armed and equipped it. It recruited Polish emigrants in France, the United States and Brazil and Polish prisoners of war from the Austrian and German armies. In October 1918 General Józef Haller took command, and the army eventually numbered about 70,000 men.¹² › Józef Haller: the general of the Blue Army

On 22 June 1918, at Mailly in Champagne, the army's first regiments received their colors at a ceremony attended by the French president and members of Dmowski's committee; the Museum of Polish History's biography says that Dmowski himself handed the colors to four regiments.¹³

Dmowski himself later wrote that the army was what made the Allies treat Poland as one of their own: an army fighting beside the Allies, in his account, was Poland's only claim to the status of an allied state and so to a seat at the peace conference. Without it, he argued, Poland, with its Legions that had fought on the side of the Central Powers and its Regency Council in Warsaw, might have ended up among the defeated.¹⁴

America and Wilson, 1918

In the second half of 1918 Dmowski traveled to the United States. He took part in the Polish emigration congress in Detroit in late August, where Polish Americans pledged support for the army in France; the philosopher John Dewey, in a confidential report of 1918 on the Polish community in the United States, noted press reports that Dmowski dominated the convention. He met President Woodrow Wilson twice, in September and November, and on 8 October 1918 handed him a memorandum on the territory of the future Polish state.¹⁵

Two Polish governments, November 1918 to January 1919

When the war ended in November 1918, Poland had two centers of power. In Warsaw, Piłsudski took power as Chief of State and appointed a socialist government under Jędrzej Moraczewski. In Paris, the National Committee was the body the Allies knew, and it refused to recognize the Warsaw government. Waldemar Tyszuk of the Institute of National Remembrance quotes a Western comment of the time: there were “two Polish governments, one that cannot get out of its country, and another that cannot get into it.”¹⁶

On 21 December 1918 Piłsudski wrote to Dmowski that he was sending a delegation to Paris and wished “to avoid a dual representation of Poland before the Entente.” His envoys arrived in Paris early in 1919; the talks with the committee were difficult, and the committee demanded that Piłsudski recognize it as Poland's representation to the Allies and form a coalition government.¹⁷

The compromise came in January 1919. Moraczewski stepped down, and on 16 January 1919 Paderewski, a member of the committee, became prime minister and foreign minister. In Tyszuk's judgment, without giving the premiership to a member of the committee, international recognition of the Polish state would have met further problems.¹⁸

At the Paris Peace Conference

Dmowski and Paderewski were Poland's delegates to the peace conference, and Dmowski headed the Polish delegation. On 29 January 1919 he was called before the Council of Ten, the conference's leading body, with President Wilson and Georges Clemenceau present; David Lloyd George joined the afternoon session. The American minutes show him speaking first about Poland's military situation, the need to send supplies through Danzig and the fighting in the Prussian partition, and then, in the afternoon, about Poland's frontiers. The Polish Senate, in a resolution of 2024, described it as a five-hour speech delivered alternately in French and English.¹⁹

The minutes record some of his arguments. He told the Council that eastern Germany was “not naturally German but was Germanised,” that Danzig was far more Polish than the German statistics showed, and proposed that East Prussia become a small separate republic with its capital at Königsberg. He said it was too early to think of Lithuania or Ukraine as independent states and suggested that Lithuania be united with Poland. Jan Engelgard, writing in Niepodległość i Pamięć, the journal of the Museum of Independence, quotes him as offering Lithuania autonomy within that union; the Lithuanian national encyclopedia states that he demanded Lithuania's attachment to Poland.²⁰

According to the general and historian Marian Kukiel, quoted in the Polish state education platform, Dmowski impressed the conference with an improvised lecture full of facts and figures. A commission on Polish affairs under the French diplomat Jules Cambon was set up to draw the frontier with Germany. In late February and early March 1919 the delegation set out Poland's western and eastern claims in written notes.²¹

The Allies did not accept every Polish claim. The draft treaty handed to Germany on 7 May 1919 assigned most of Upper Silesia to Poland; after German objections the final text put it to a plebiscite.²²

The Treaty of Versailles

On 28 June 1919, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, Paderewski and Dmowski signed the peace treaty with Germany for Poland. The treaty names them as the plenipotentiaries of the President of the Polish Republic: Paderewski as prime minister and foreign minister, Dmowski as “President of the Polish National Committee.”²³

In Article 87 Germany recognized “the complete independence of Poland” and gave up to Poland Greater Poland and Gdańsk Pomerania, the corridor that gave Poland access to the Baltic. Danzig became a Free City under the League of Nations, with special rights for Poland. Upper Silesia and parts of East and West Prussia were left to plebiscites, and Poland's eastern frontier was not fixed at all.²⁴

The same day Poland signed a second treaty, with the principal Allied powers, on the protection of minorities, often called the Little Treaty of Versailles. It guaranteed equal rights to all citizens and included provisions on Jewish schools and on the Sabbath, and minorities could take their complaints to the League of Nations. Gershon Bacon writes in the YIVO Encyclopedia that Polish representatives blamed Jewish lobbying for a treaty they saw as an insult to national honor.²⁵

Nationalism and antisemitism

Gershon Bacon writes that the National Democrats under Dmowski wanted a more compact, ethnically Polish state, did not acknowledge the aspirations of national minorities and “developed an openly antisemitic stance,” portraying Jews as an alien force in the economy and calling for mass Jewish emigration. Leon Volovici, in the same encyclopedia, writes that Dmowski, Popławski and Balicki regarded Jews as alien and hostile to Polish national interests.²⁶

After the National Democrats lost the 1912 election to the Fourth Duma in Warsaw, the movement organized an economic boycott of Jewish businesses. Grzegorz Krzywiec of the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences sees the boycott as the culmination of the movement's turn to an ideological antisemitism, and links the spread of antisemitism in interwar Poland with the rise of modern nationalism and “specifically with the figure of Roman Dmowski,” its chief ideologue.²⁷

Interpretations of this side of his legacy differ. The historian and former opposition politician Aleksander Hall, interviewed by the Museum of Polish History, said that “Dmowski was an antisemite,” but argued that his antisemitism came from his view of the threats posed by a large unassimilated community and had nothing in common with the biological racism of German Nazism. Krzywiec, in his monograph Szowinizm po polsku (2009), sees a political mythology “with racist anti-Semitism at the front” in Dmowski's early program; reviewing the book, the historian Małgorzata Dajnowicz called its thesis on racism very controversial and rejected the view that racism was a basic element of his worldview. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine, published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, points to another side of his program: he opposed Ukrainian independence and favored dividing Ukraine between Poland and the Soviet Union.²⁸

Later life

Dmowski held government office only briefly in independent Poland: in 1923 he was foreign minister for a few weeks. After Piłsudski's coup of May 1926 he went into opposition, and that year he founded the Camp of Great Poland (Obóz Wielkiej Polski), and in 1928 the National Party (Stronnictwo Narodowe).²⁹

Volovici writes that the Camp of Great Poland demanded the exclusion of Jews, including converts, from political life; the Museum of Polish History's biography describes its militant actions as mainly antisemitic. The state authorities dissolved it in 1933. Dmowski died on 2 January 1939.³⁰

Legacy and remembrance

In Poland, Dmowski is counted among the “fathers of independence” together with Piłsudski, Paderewski, Wincenty Witos, Ignacy Daszyński and Wojciech Korfanty. On 25 September 2024 the Polish Senate adopted a resolution marking the 160th anniversary of his birth; it called his part in the recovery of statehood in 1918 undeniable and named the Paris Peace Conference as the culmination of his work.³¹

A monument to Dmowski stands in Warsaw. Krzywiec notes that its unveiling drew protests from those who associate him with the spread of antisemitism, and Volovici notes that nationalist groups after 1989 revived the tradition of his movement.³²

Aleksander Hall argues that serious historians now see Dmowski as one of the two most important makers of Polish independence, and that the efforts of the Piłsudski and Dmowski camps during World War I turned out to be complementary, an unintended “game on two pianos” that served the Polish cause.³³ › The Battles That Won Polish Independence, 1914 to 1921

The borders that Versailles left open were settled by force in the following years: in the fighting for Lwów and Eastern Galicia and in the Polish-Soviet War, decided at the Battle of Warsaw in August 1920.