The Polish government moves to Angers

In the second half of November 1939 the Polish government-in-exile left Paris and moved to Angers, the old capital of Anjou on the river Maine, less than 300 kilometres south-west of the French capital. France granted the Polish authorities extraterritorial status in the town: the buildings in which they worked were treated as territory of the Polish Republic. Some chronologies record under 14 November that the government moved “to London”. This is a mistake as to the place and, most probably, as to the day. The government reached London only in June 1940, after the fall of France. In mid-November 1939 preparations were under way for the move to the Loire, and Polish and French accounts give 22 November as the day the seat of government was transferred. President Władysław Raczkiewicz took up residence in the Château de Pignerolle near Angers at the beginning of December. For seven months this small French town was the capital of fighting Poland.

A government from Paris

The authorities who came to Angers had been formed in Paris in the last days of September. President Ignacy Mościcki, interned in Romania, used Article 24 of the April Constitution to designate as his successor Władysław Raczkiewicz, who was sworn in at the Polish embassy in Paris on 30 September. The same day the new President entrusted the task of forming a government to General Władysław Sikorski, an opponent of the Sanation regime – the ruling camp founded by Piłsudski – who had long had close ties with France. The cabinet included men from the camps that Sanation had fought before the war: the National Democrat Stanisław Stroński as deputy prime minister, the socialist Jan Stańczyk, the peasant-party politician Aleksander Ładoś, the National Democrat Marian Seyda (PL) and General Józef Haller of the Labour Party. The foreign minister was the diplomat August Zaleski, who had headed Polish diplomacy in Piłsudski’s time, and the government also included General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, whom the President designated as his own successor on 16 October.

The government was recognised by France, Britain, the United States and most of the countries of the world. Germany and the Soviet Union maintained that the Polish state had ceased to exist. Under pressure from Moscow, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia broke off relations with the Polish government in October. Poland was nevertheless better placed than Czechoslovakia, whose émigrés were in those same weeks still seeking recognition for a national committee: it had a legitimate president, a government with constitutional continuity, embassies, and gold reserves that had been taken out of the country through Romania.

Paris soon proved awkward for the government. Polish ministers and officials were scattered among hotels and the embassy, thousands of refugees were streaming into the capital, and bitter scores were being settled between Sikorski’s people and the pre-war Sanation cadres. The French, for their part, preferred that a foreign government should not operate at the very centre of their politics and become a focus for émigré quarrels. They also cited security: in the event of air raids Paris was a target, whereas the provinces offered more calm.

An extraterritorial capital on the Loire

The choice fell on Angers, the prefecture of the Maine-et-Loire department, a quiet university town with a great medieval castle. The French government agreed that the buildings occupied by the Polish authorities should have extraterritorial status, which underlined that Poland was a sovereign state and not just a group of refugees. The ministries were housed in public buildings, hotels and villas in the town. The President took up residence in the Château de Pignerolle, an eighteenth-century mansion in the commune of Saint-Barthélemy-d’Anjou on the outskirts of Angers, made available by the family that owned it. According to most sources he moved in on 2 or 3 December 1939. The Council of Ministers met in Angers, and the President’s chancellery was located there.

Not everything was moved, however. Sikorski, as both Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief, divided his time between Angers and Paris, where his staff, the centres for rebuilding the army and his contacts with the French high command remained. Polish units were formed mainly at the Coëtquidan camp in Brittany. The embassy, headed by Juliusz Łukasiewicz, and many Polish émigré institutions also operated in Paris. Angers was thus a formal capital rather than the sole centre of decision-making, but its extraterritorial buildings were a symbol of the continuity of a state whose territory was occupied by two invaders.

November and December 1939

The move coincided with the weeks in which the state in exile was taking shape. On 7 November Sikorski replaced Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, interned in Romania, as Commander-in-Chief and Inspector General of the Armed Forces. On 13 November he established the Union of Armed Struggle (ZWZ), which replaced the Service for Poland’s Victory, set up in Warsaw as the city capitulated, together with the Committee of Ministers for Home Affairs under Sosnkowski’s chairmanship. In this way the government sought to direct the underground from France and to limit the influence of Sanation officers in occupied Poland. At the same time news was arriving of the crimes of both occupiers: of the arrest of the Kraków professors and of the annexation of the eastern borderlands by the USSR, against which the government protested.

On 30 November Raczkiewicz declared in a radio address that the powers which the April Constitution allowed him to exercise on his own he would exercise “in close agreement with the President of the Council of Ministers”. This so-called Paris Agreement was a compromise between a President who came from the Sanation camp and a Prime Minister whose camp did not recognise the 1935 constitution. The same day the government issued a decree declaring the legal acts of the occupation authorities null and void. On 9 December the President established the National Council of the Republic of Poland, an advisory body intended to take the place of the dissolved parliament. Its chairman was Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the aged pianist and prime minister of 1919, and its vice-chairmen were representatives of the National Democrats, the peasant party and the socialists: Tadeusz Bielecki, Stanisław Mikołajczyk and Herman Lieberman. The Council sat in Paris from January 1940. On 18 December the government issued a declaration of its programme: Germany was the main enemy, Poland would fight alongside the Allies until it regained its independence, and its eastern border remained inviolable.

The army and the spring of 1940

The most important task of the government in Angers was to rebuild the army. On 4 January 1940 a Polish–French military agreement was signed, providing for a Polish army in France under Polish command. Its ranks were filled by Poles living in France, often miners from the northern departments, and by soldiers who had made their way out of Poland through Romania and Hungary. By the spring of 1940 it numbered more than 80,000 men. The Independent Podhale Rifles Brigade fought at Narvik in May, and the 1st Grenadier Division in Lorraine in June. The Carpathian Rifles Brigade was being formed in Syria, and the Polish Navy and the first air force units were operating in Britain.

Place in the history of the war

The Angers period was brought to an end by the German offensive in the west. In June 1940, as France was collapsing, the Polish authorities were evacuated to Britain by way of Libourne near Bordeaux. Sikorski flew to London, where on 19 June he met Prime Minister Winston Churchill, while the President sailed aboard a British cruiser. Only part of the army, about a third, could be evacuated. Only then did the government become the “London government”, as it was known right up to 1990. In July 1940 Raczkiewicz tried to dismiss Sikorski, but withdrew the decision under pressure from the army, the National Council and the British.

Angers is remembered as the first permanent seat of the Polish state in exile and as proof that in the autumn of 1939 Poland did not cease to exist as a subject of international law. The extraterritorial buildings on the Loire, the Polish army formed in France and Allied recognition ensured that the Republic remained a party to the war. After 1940 the Château de Pignerolle was taken over by the Germans, and from 1943 the Kriegsmarine set up a U-boat communications centre there. Anjou’s ties with Poland nevertheless survived the war, and the memory of the Polish authorities in Angers is kept alive today by local associations and commemorative plaques.