page_title: Józef Piłsudski
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Józef Piłsudski / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Piłusdski statue in Warsaw and honour guards.Polski: Pomnik Józefa Piłsudskiego przy placu Marszałka Józefa Piłsudskiego w Warszawie
context_page_description: Józef Klemens Piłsudski was a Polish statesman who served as the Chief of State and First Marshal of Poland. He was considered the de facto leader of the Second Polish Republic as the Minister of Military Affairs. After World War I, he held great power in Polish politics and was a distinguished figure on the international scene. He is viewed as a father of the Second Polish Republic re-established in 1918, 123 years after the final Partition of Poland by Austria, Prussia and Russia in 1795.
  Seeing himself as a descendant of the culture and traditions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Piłsudski believed in a multi-ethnic Poland—"a home of nations" including indigenous ethnic and religious minorities he hoped would establish a robust union with the independent states of Lithuania and Ukraine. His principal political opponent, Roman Dmowski, leader of the National Democrat party, by contrast, called for a Poland limited to the pre-Partitions Polish Crown and based mainly on a homogeneous ethnically Polish population and Roman Catholic identity.
  Early in his political career, Piłsudski became a leader of the Polish Socialist Party.
context_section_description: On 13 May 1935, in accordance with Piłsudski's last wishes, Edward Rydz-Śmigły was named by Poland's president and government to be Inspector-General of the Polish Armed Forces, and on 10 November 1936, he was elevated to Marshal of Poland. Rydz was now one of the most powerful people in Poland, the "second man in the state after the President". While many saw Rydz-Śmigły as a successor to Piłsudski, he never became as influential.
  As the Polish government became increasingly authoritarian and conservative, the Rydz-Śmigły faction was opposed by that of the more moderate Ignacy Mościcki, who remained President. After 1938 Rydz-Śmigły reconciled with the President, but the ruling group remained divided into the "President's Men", mostly civilians (the "Castle Group", after the President's official residence, Warsaw's Royal Castle), and the "Marshal's Men" ("Piłsudski's colonels"), professional military officers and old comrades-in-arms of Piłsudski's. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, some of this political division would survive within the Polish government in exile.
  Piłsudski had given Poland something akin to what Henryk Sienkiewicz's Onufry Zagłoba had mused about: a Polish Oliver Cromwell. As such, the Marshal had inevitably drawn both intense loyalty and intense vilification.
  In 1935, at Piłsudski's funeral, President Mościcki eulogized the Marshal: "He was the king of our hearts and the sovereign of our will. During a half-century of his life's travails, he captured heart after heart, soul after soul, until he had drawn the whole of Poland within the purple of his royal spirit ... He gave Poland freedom, boundaries, power and respect."
  When Piłsudski died, in spite of his special sympathy for Piłsudski, Hitler sent Ribbentrop to represent the Reich instead of attending his funeral himself. Hitler had an honour guard set at Piłsudski's grave by the Wehrmacht after it took Kraków. He would later say, after attacking Poland, that things wouldn't have turned out that way had old Piłsudski still been alive. He had earlier been, to his excitement, congratulated by Piłsudski on winning the 1933 elections.
  After World War II, little of Piłsudski's thought influenced the policies of the Polish People's Republic, a de facto satellite of the Soviet Union. 
  For a decade after World War II, Piłsudski was either ignored or condemned by Poland's communist government, along with the entire interwar Second Polish Republic. This began to change, however, particularly after de-Stalinization and the Polish October (1956), and historiography in Poland gradually moved away from a purely negative view of Piłsudski toward a more balanced and neutral assessment.
  After the fall of communism and the 1991 disintegration of the Soviet Union, Piłsudski once again came to be publicly acknowledged as a Polish national hero. On the sixtieth anniversary of his death, on 12 May 1995, Poland's Sejm adopted a resolution: "Józef Piłsudski will remain, in our nation's memory, the founder of its independence and the victorious leader who fended off a foreign assault that threatened the whole of Europe and its civilization. Józef Piłsudski served his country well and has entered our history forever."
  While some of Piłsudski's political moves remain controversial—particularly the May 1926 Coup d'état, the Brest trials (1931–32), the 1934 establishment of the Bereza Kartuska detention camp, and successive Polish governments' failure to formulate consistent, constructive policies toward the national minorities—Piłsudski continues to be viewed by most Poles as a providential figure in the country's 20th-century history.
  Piłsudski has lent his name to several military units, including the 1st Legions Infantry Division and armored train No. 51 ("I Marszałek"—"the First Marshal").
  Also named for Piłsudski have been Piłsudski's Mound, one of four-man-made mounds in Kraków; the Józef Piłsudski Institute of America, a New York City research center and museum on the modern history of Poland; the Józef Piłsudski University of Physical Education in Warsaw; 
caption: Statue of Piłsudski on Warsaw's Piłsudski Square—one of many statuary tributes throughout Poland
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