Author
Stanisław Kozicki 1876-1958

He was born in Łępice in Mazovia on the 4th of April 1876. At the age of 23 he joined the National League, a secret pro-independence political organization that evolved out of the Polish League. Then, in 1902, he became a member of the National-Democratic Party. One of the results of his frequent foreign trips was his encounter in Paris with Maria Czaykowska, a painter from Kraków, whom Kozicki married in 1907. After the marriage he again sojourned in Paris for two years, attending the Institute of Political Studies as an unenrolled student. In dealing with the problems of international politics, his attention was drawn towards the person and beliefs of Charles Maurras, the French philosopher, monarchist, and, above all, the inventor of the idea of integral nationalism. Following his return to Poland in 1910, Kozicki became a member of both the Central Committee of the National League and the Executive Board of the National-Democratic Party, and in 1918 he joined the Polish National Committee in Paris. At the same time, he became the editor-in-chief of Gazeta Warszawska (and was to hold that post again in 1924), and also collaborated with Przegląd Narodowy, where he dealt with various issues of international politics. From 1914 to 1918 he edited Gazeta Polska, and in Poznań he ran Kurier Poznański and Przegląd Wszechpolski’”. In 1918, by virtue of the decision of Roman Dmowski, Kozicki became the secretary-general of the Polish delegation for the Paris Peace Conference during which the Treaty of Versailles was signed. In 1920 he settled down in Poznań, where he was elected to the Polish Sejm in 1922 on behalf of the Popular National Union (ZLN). In his political career he held, in succession, the posts of a member of the presidium of the latter political group’s parliamentary club; the chairman of that club, and ZLN Executive Board president. For eleven months he was also the ambassador of the Second Polish Republic to Rome; then in 1928-1935 he was twice elected to the Senate. As a senator, he was particularly critical of the League of Nations, constantly appealing that no efforts should be spared in order to make Poland ready for war. After the end of his term, he retired from political activity, focusing instead on the output of the eminent Polish poets Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, and Zygmunt Krasiński, which resulted in writing a paper on the Polish political thought of the period of Romanticism. Kozicki resumed his active public life only after the outbreak of the Second World War, when during the German occupation of Poland General Stefan Rowecki offered him a seat on an advisory committee (Kozicki supported, for instance, the campaign for uniting all the political and military groups forming the Polish underground movement). After the fall of the Warsaw Uprising, he moved from the capital to the village of Śmiłowice near Proszowice, and then to Kraków. Finally, in 1947 he settled down in Polanica Zdrój where he lived until his death on the 28th of September, 1958. In that period he collaborated with Catholic magazines Tygodnik Powszechny and Kierunki and was occupied in writing his book entitled Historia Ligi Narodowej, as well as in translating scientific works by various foreign authors into Polish. He was buried next to his wife at the local cemetery. His major works include Bułgarja współczesna (1917), Sprawa granic Polski na konferencji pokojowej w Paryżu (1921; reissued in 2009), Cieśla czy sternik: zagadnienie rządu w Polsce (1942), Naród i wojsko (1943), Dziedzictwo polityczne trzech wieszczów (1949). Among his posthumously published papers, the most important are Historia Ligi Narodowej (okres 1887–1907) (published in London in 1964); the biographical book Roman Dmowski: zarys biograficzny (co-authored by Ignacy Chrzanowski; 1988) and Pamiętnik 1876-1939 (2009).

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