Roman Dmowski, one of the Fathers of Independence, died 84 years ago. His contribution to Poland has only recently been commemorated, and yet attempts are being made to erase it.
Roman Dmowski was born on 9 August 1864. After the outbreak of the First World War, he became a member of the Polish National Committee set up on 25 November 1914 in Warsaw. Representing a pro-Russian orientation, it comprised mainly representatives of the National Democracy.
In 1919. Dmowski, together with Prime Minister Ignacy Paderewski, represented Poland at the Paris Peace Conference. On June 28, 1919, he co-signed the Treaty of Versailles on the behalf of Poland. Between 1919 and 1922, Roman Dmowski was a deputy to the Sejm (he was elected in absentia during his stay at the conference in Paris). In 1920, during the Polish-Bolshevik war, he was a member of the State Defence Council. In 1923, he was Minister of Foreign Affairs in Wincenty Witos’s government.
After the May Coup of 1926, Dmowski founded the Camp of Great Poland, an extra-parliamentary and supra-party organisation in opposition to the government authorities. Its ideological declaration, of which he was the author, assumed, among other things, national solidarity, a close relationship between the state and the Church, and the need to shape social and moral discipline.
Dmowski died after a long illness on 2 January 1939 in Drozdowo near Łomża. He was buried in the family tomb in the Bródno Cemetery in Warsaw. It was one of the largest national manifestations in interwar Poland. The funeral procession from St. John the Baptist Cathedral to Bródno was attended by – according to different sources – from 100 to 200 thousand people.