CONSERVATIVES OF THE KINGDOM OF POLAND IN 1914-1916

Abstract

Since the birth of independent Poland in 1918, historians and publicists have been arguing about who deserves the main credit for this most signifi cant event in the modern history of the Polish nation. In the period between the world wars, the dispute for supremacy was fought between J. Piłsudski and R. Dmowski, in socialist Poland they were supplanted by the Russian October Revolution, but already in the 1980s the debate resumed with renewed vigor. Th e compromise solution proposed by Prof. S. Kieniewicz was not widely s upported. Since the 1990s, there has been a steady return to pre-war approaches to the problem. Th us, political forces other than the pilsudniks and national democrats, led by R. Dmowski, once again remain outside the fi eld of vision of the authors writing on this topic. Among them are conservatives of the Kingdom of Poland, through whose eff orts, from September 1917 to 14 November 1918, the construction of the state institutions of the Kingdom of Poland was underway with the consent of the Central Powers. Th e Kingdom was formed by the act of Emperors Wilhelm II Hohenzollern and Franz Joseph Habsburg of 5 November 1916. Th e contribution of the conservatives is clearly underestimated; moreover, they alone are accused of pursuing a conciliatory (Ugodian) policy towards the Russian, fi rst, and then the German and Austro-Hungarian authorities, although all other political parties in the Polish lands, with the exception of the social democrats of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, also took conciliatory positions at the beginning of the 20th century. Moreover, it was these parties, which were united under the general name of “activists”, who responded to the manifesto of 5 November and sent their representatives to the Provisional State Council of the Polish Kingdom. Th e conservatives, on the other hand, took a wait-and-see attitude in November 1916 and refused political cooperation with the German and Austro-Hungarian occupation authorities until September 1917.