IL CONCILIATORE
«Foglio scientifico-letterario», known as «il foglio azzurro» [the blue sheet] for the colour of the paper on which it was published in Milan twice weekly from 3 Oct. 1818 to 17 Nov. 1819. A total of 118 issues appeared; two others were prepared but never printed.
It was conceived in 1816 by the circle of friends around L. GEMME (v.), immediately after the Biblioteca italiana had provoked controversy, and at first as a polemical sheet under the title Bersaglier. When the Berchet group, which looked to Manzoni as its spiritual leader, joined the project, the way was opened to a practical realisation of the newspaper on the basis of a «conciliation» among the contributors themselves and with respect to our literary tradition. The moral and financial promoters of the enterprise were Porro and Confaloniere; the Milanese publisher V. Ferrario secured, with some cunning, the Austrian permit to publish. Only then, in May 1818, did the joint work begin and the programme was drafted by Borsieri.
The government’s insistence and calculated error smoothed the path, while the criticisms, satires and theatrical farces of the opponents piqued public curiosity. When the governor Strassoldo finally noticed, it was too late, and his attempts to harass the newspaper with censorship and obstacles proved vain.
After a more energetic police warning to Pellico, the publication ceased. The «conciliators» then turned to direct action, becoming Carbonari or conspirators, and prepared themselves for prison and exile, leaving to their most discreet friend, Manzoni, the task of becoming the immortal poet of their aspirations, and to Berchet and Pellico the possibility of recalling their entire anguish after the lost cause. The C. did not achieve the circulation its contributors hoped for: barely 250 subscribers were enrolled; yet quality compensated for quantity, and thus the historical role of the newspaper was significant. That small aristocracy of barely twenty people (who mostly concealed themselves behind initials and pseudonyms) was united in directing attention wherever something useful, new or interesting for Italy was perceived in the world, and the newspaper’s finest work lay precisely in the realm of letters.
One cannot understand the stance of Lombard romanticism in 1816 without the developments that the same writers pursued in the C., above all Berchet, Visconti, Pellico and Borsieri; nor can one grasp Manzoni’s later clarification up to 1823 without those developments of the «conciliators», as Manzoni himself attests to Fauriel.
The much-invoked «modernity» of poetry consisted in fact in its vigorous sense of the concrete, in its «historicity»; and thus the «conciliators» sincerely saw themselves as heirs both of seventeenth-century enthusiasms and of Vico’s and the compilers of Il Caffè’s brilliant critical intuitions, extending back to Parini, Alfieri and Foscolo, even if those traditions infused their spirits with a broader outlook consonant with the idealistic and spiritualistic tendencies of the age. Their effort to free intellects from every pedantic encumbrance and from the lingering naturalism of preromantic neoclassicism merged with a more conscious aspiration for a national literature capable of competing with the other European literatures.
Ettore Li Gotti
CONCILIA-
ZIONE: V. PATTI
LATERANENSIS; QUE-
STIONE ROMANA.