A dictator’s adherents usually turn him into a Plutarchian hero. It is the fate of all dictators. Though this was the lot of Primo de Rivera and of Pilsudski, they would doubtless have met with difficulties far more serious if the Cortes and the Diet had been the House of Commons or the Palais-Bourbon.

But their success did not depend upon the fact that the Cortes and the Diet were not the House of Commons or the Palais-Bourbon, and that in Spain in 1923 and in Poland in 1926 there was no Parliamentary democracy strong enough to defend public rights. One of the gravest dangers which confronts a modern State is the vulnerability of Parliament. All Parliaments, without exception, are more or less vulnerable. Parliamentary democracies make the mistake of placing too much faith in the triumphs of liberty, while in reality nothing is more fragile than the modern European State. It is a dangerous illusion to believe that Parliament is the best defence of the State against a Bonapartist venture, and that liberty can be protected by liberty itself and by police measures. This is what the deputies of the Cortes and the Diet believed until the eve of the coups d’Etat of Primo de Rivera and Pilsudski.

Among the heroes of Plutarch’s Illustrious Lives, there is scarcely a single gentleman. Perhaps this is why Primo de Rivera, gentleman and general, will not go down to history as one of Plutarch’s heroes.

Nothing in the unfortunate story of this dictator is so tragic as his loyalty and his sincerity. He cannot be accused of having served his country with mediocre intelligence, rather should he be accused of having placed his high character at the disposal of the King. Dictators should beware of constitutional kings, even as Metternich did. The complicity of the King is the most interesting—perhaps the only interesting—element in the Spanish dictatorship. But for the collusion of Alphonso XIII, Primo de Rivera would not have seized the power, dissolved the Cortes, suppressed public rights, and yet governed within the limits of the Constitution. The real deus ex machina of the coup d’Etat, responsible for the dictatorship, was not Primo de Rivera, but the King. It is said that de Rivera was a Bonaparte despite himself, in that parody of the eighteenth Brumaire; but throughout the hopeless comedy of a coup d’Etat and a dictatorship “in the name of the King,” Primo de Rivera merely played the role of a “Mussolini despite himself” in the political service of a seditious King. In a Constitutional Monarchy there is no room for a dictator: only courtiers might, out of a spirit of flattery, try their hand at a coup d’Etat. The collusion of the King and Primo de Rivera was not so much a compromise between the Constitution and the Dictatorship as an equivocal pact between a courtier and his King. Primo de Rivera was not a dictator; he was merely a courtier. This plot whose stakes were constitutional safeguards, the rights of Parliament, and political freedom, could only end in treason. It was a poor story in which a King added treason to complicity in a venture for which he alone could be held responsible before the Constitution and the people.

The lesson to be learned from Spain is unfavourable to dictatorships “by order of the King.” To justify the attitude of Alphonso XIII towards his accomplice and to explain the advent of the Republic, it has been said that instead of giving the State an “autocratic democracy,” he merely gave it a dictatorship. Are we to believe that Primo de Rivera did not serve his King faithfully? Was it not the aim of his dictatorship to attack the rights of Parliament and constitutional liberty and indeed to create an “autocratic democracy”? That Primo de Rivera, as a faithful servant of the crown, obeyed only the will of the King was proved by the course of events. He cannot be blamed for this logical outcome of dictatorship, but a constitutional Monarch should not have forgotten it. This logical sequence of events gave birth to the Spanish Republic.

Of all the coups d’Etat which bear comparison with the eighteenth Brumaire, that of Pilsudski in May 1926 is perhaps the most interesting. In 1920, Lloyd George called Pilsudski a Socialist Bonaparte (he never liked Socialist Generals). And Pilsudski showed that he knew how to enlist Karl Marx in the service of a bourgeots dictatorship. The new element in Pilsudski’s coup d’Etat was the complicity of the working masses. Those who carried out his insurrectional tactics were not workers, but soldiers of regiments which had mutinied. It was those soldiers who occupied the bridges, the depots of provisions and ammunitions, the crossroads, railway stations, telephone and telegraph offices, and the banks. The masses took no part in the attack on Warsaw’s strategic points which were defended by troops faithful to the Witos government, nor in the siege of the Belvedere where the President of the Republic and his Ministers had taken refuge. Once more, soldiers played their classic role in Bonapartist tactics. The novel element in this insurrection was a general strike proclaimed by the Socialist Party to help Pilsudski fight the coalition of the Right and thus cut the ground from under Witos’ feet. This original factor in the game gave a new social justification to the violent act of military sedition. Since the workers were involved, Pilsudski’s soldiers seemed to be defending the liberty of the people. Thanks to a participation of the working masses in the tactics of revolution, a general strike quickly turned the military revolt into a popular insurrection backed up by a part of the army. Thus Pilsudski, nothing more than a rebel general at the beginning of the coup d’Etat, became a sort of captain of the people, a proletarian hero, as Lloyd George had said: a Socialist Bonaparte.

But a General Strike alone could not bring Pilsudski within the pale of the law. He too was afraid of being outlawed. At bottom, this Socialist general was only a bourgeois Catiline engaged in planning and carrying out the most audacious schemes within the civic and historic traditions of his time and of his people. He was a rebel who undertook to overthrow the State without being outlawed. Such was his hatred of Witos that he denied him the right to defend the State. When the troops which remained faithful to the Government resisted attack, Pilsudski, like a true Lithuanian Pole, “wild and stubborn,” was thoroughly roused. He countered machine-gun with machine-gun. It was the Lithuanian Pole who kept the Socialist General from becoming a legal instrument of Government, from taking advantage of subsequent events to undo the mistakes made at the beginning. A Parliamentary coup d’Etat is not started by an active military expedition. As Montron would say: “It isn’t done.”

Pilsudski found a conspirator in the Socialist Party, and tactical strength in a general strike; but he had to win the Marshal of the Diet as an ally. Pilsudski was going to overthrow the State by means of the Constitution. While the battle was being fought in the suburbs of Warsaw and General Haller got ready to come from Posnania to rescue the Government, inside the besieged Belvedere, Woitciekowski, President of the Republic, and Witos, President of the Council, decided to place the power in the hands of the Marshal of the Diet, according to constitutional custom. From then on, the guarantor of the Constitution was no longer the President of the Republic, but the Marshal of the Diet. This was merely the beginning of the Parliamentary coup d’Etat: until then it was no more than a military revolt, strengthened by a general strike. Pilsudski afterwards said that if Woitciekowski and Witos had waited until the arrival of their loyal troops, the revolutionary attack would probably have failed. A too hasty decision on the part of the President of the Republic and of Witos transformed the insurrection into a Parliamentary coup d’Etat. Now it was up to the Marshal of the Diet to let Pilsudski take his stand on legal ground. “I do not wish to establish a dictatorship,” announced Pilsudski, as soon as he felt his feet on Parliamentary ground. “I intend to act only according to the Constitution, to increase the prestige, the power, and the authority of the State.” Like all reactionary conspirators who seize power by force, his one ambition was to pass for a faithful servant of the State.

And Pilsudski made his entry into Warsaw like a true servant of the State, his carriage drawn by four horses and escorted by smiling Uhlans. The crowds lining the pavements of the Krakowski Przedmiescie welcomed him with cries of “Long live Pilsudski! Long live the Republic!” The Marshal of the Diet would not find it difficult to come to terms with him about the Constitution. He thought: “Now that the Revolution is over, we shall be able to understand each other.”

But the Parliamentary coup d’Etat had only just begun. And even today, when the Constitution has gradually become an instrument of dictatorship, and when democratic and proletarian Poland is a willing supporter of insurrection, and still an enemy of the Socialist General, after so many conspiracies and so many lost illusions, Pilsudski has not yet found a way of reconciling violence with legality.

In 1926 Pilsudski’s Parliamentary coup d’Etat was just beginning. Today it is a coup d’Etat which is still unsuccessful.