IL CONCILIATORE. - "Foglio scientifico-letterario" ("Scientific-literary sheet"), called "il foglio azzurro" ("the blue sheet") from the color of the paper on which it was published in Milan twice weekly from 3 Oct. 1818 to 17 Nov. 1819. 118 issues came out; two others remained set in type.
It was conceived by the group of friends of L. di Breme (v.), in 1816, as soon as the Biblioteca italiana aroused discontent, and at first as a fighting sheet under the title Bersagliere. When the Berchet group, which ideally looked to Manzoni, joined the project, it became possible to move toward a practical realization of the journal, on the basis of a "conciliation" of the contributors among themselves and with regard to our literary tradition. The moral and financial promoters of the undertaking were Porro and Confalonieri; the publisher was the Milanese V. Ferrario, who cleverly managed to obtain the permission to publish from Austria. Only then, in May 1818, did the common work begin, and the program was drawn up by Borsieri.
The government's ineptitude and miscalculation smoothed its path, and the criticisms, satires and theatrical farces of its adversaries made the public curious. When the governor Strassoldo later took offense at it, it was too late, and in vain did he harass the journal with censures and difficulties.
After a more energetic warning from the police to Pellico, once publication ceased, the "conciliators" turned to action and became Carbonari or conspirators, and prepared themselves for prison and exile, leaving to the most discreet of their friends, Manzoni, the task of becoming the immortal poet of their purposes and to Berchet and Pellico the possibility of recalling post res perditas their inner anguish. Il C. did not have the circulation that the contributors hoped for: the subscribers barely reached about 250; but quality made up for quantity and therefore the journal's historical function was great: that small aristocracy of barely twenty people (who mostly concealed themselves with initials and pseudonyms) was unanimously agreed in wanting to turn attention wherever something useful, new, interesting for Italy was perceived in the world, and the journal's best work was exercised precisely in the field of letters.
One cannot understand the stance taken by Lombard Romanticism in 1816 without the developments that the same writers gave to those first polemics in Il C., especially Berchet, Visconti, Pellico and Borsieri; nor can one understand the further Manzonian clarification up to 1823 without those developments of the "conciliators," as Manzoni himself testified to Fauriel.
The much-invoked "modernity" of poetry consisted in fact in its vigorous sense of the concrete, in its "historicity"; and therefore the "conciliators" sincerely felt themselves continuators both of the seventeenth-century enthusiasms and of the brilliant critical intuitions of Vico and of the compilers of the Caffè down to Parini, Alfieri and Foscolo, even if they invested those traditions with a broader spiritualistic and idealistic breath, according to the needs of the times. Their effort to free intellectuals from every pedantic dross and from the naturalistic residues of pre-Romantic Neoclassicism merges with the more conscious aspiration to a national literature competing with the other European literatures.
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Ettore Li Gotti