Ignacy Mościcki

Ignacy Mościcki (1867-1946) was a Polish politician and chemist, president of Poland (1926-1939).

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Ignacy Mościcki was born December 1, 1867, in Mierzanów (a small town near Ciechanów, Poland). After completing school in Warsaw, he studied chemistry at the Riga Polytechnicum. There he joined the Polish underground leftist organization, Proletariat.

On graduating he returned to Warsaw, but was threatened by the Tsarist secret police with life imprisonment in Siberia and was forced to emigrate in 1892 to London. In 1896 he was offered an assistantship at the Catholic University in Fribourg (Switzerland). There he patented a method for cheap industrial production of nitric acid. In 1912 he moved to Lwów, where he accepted the Chair of Physical Chemistry and Technical Electrochemistry at the Lwów Polytechnic. In 1925 he was elected rector of the Polytechnic, but soon moved to Warsaw to continue his research at the Warsaw Polytechnic.

  After Józef Piłsudski's May coup d'etat, on June 1, 1926, Mościcki — an erstwhile associate of Piłsudski's in the Polish Socialist Party — was elected president of Poland by the National Assembly. After the death of Piłsudski, Mościcki was the leading moderate figure in the government, opposing the more right-wing Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły. Mościcki remained president until September 1939, when he was interned in Romania and forced by France to resign his office. He passed it on to Władysław Raczkiewicz. In December 1939 he was released and allowed to move to Switzerland, where he remained through World War II. He died at his home near Geneva on October 2, 1946.

See also

• Poland
• Invasion of Poland
• Mościce
• 4-year plan