CONCILIATORE, IL. — “Scientific-literary periodical,” called “the blue paper” because of the color of the paper on which it was published in Milan twice weekly from 3 Oct. 1818 to 17 Nov. 1819. It produced 118 issues; two more remained typeset.
It was conceived by the group of friends of L. di Breme (v.), in 1816, as soon as the Biblioteca italiana aroused discontent, initially as a battle sheet entitled Bersagliere. When the Berchet group, which ideally looked to Manzoni, joined the project, the newspaper could move toward practical realization, on the basis of a “conciliation” among the collaborators themselves and with regard to our literary tradition. The moral and financial promoters of the undertaking were Porro and Confalonieri; its publisher was the Milanese V. Ferrario, who astutely managed to obtain permission to publish from Austria. Only then, in May 1818, did the common work begin, and the program was drafted by Borsieri.
The government’s ineptitude and miscalculation cleared its path, while the opponents’ criticisms, satires, and theatrical farces aroused public curiosity. When Governor Strassoldo finally took offense at it, it was too late, and he vainly harassed the newspaper with censorship and obstacles.
After the police issued a more vigorous warning to Pellico, publication ceased, and the “conciliators” moved into action: they 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 aims, and to Berchet and Pellico the possibility of recalling post res perditas their inward anguish. C. did not achieve the circulation the collaborators had hoped for: the subscribers scarcely reached about 250; but quality made up for quantity, and consequently the newspaper’s historical function was great. That small aristocracy of barely twenty people (who for the most part concealed themselves behind initials and pseudonyms) was unanimous in wishing to direct attention wherever anything useful, new, or interesting for Italy could be detected in the world, and the newspaper’s finest work was carried out precisely in the field of letters.
It is impossible to understand the position taken by Lombard Romanticism in 1816 without the developments that those same writers gave to those initial controversies in C., above all Berchet, Visconti, Pellico, and Borsieri; nor can one understand Manzoni’s further clarification up to 1823 without those developments of the “conciliators,” as Manzoni himself testified to Fauriel.
The much-invoked “modernity” of poetry in fact consisted in its vigorous sense of the concrete, in its “historicity”; and therefore the “conciliators” sincerely felt themselves to be continuators both of the seventeenth-century enthusiasms and of the inspired critical insights of Vico and the compilers of Il Caffè, down through Parini, Alfieri, and Foscolo, even though those traditions were invested with a broader spiritualistic and idealistic breath, in accordance with the demands of the times. Their effort to free intellectuals from every pedantic residue and from the naturalistic remnants of pre-Romantic Neoclassicism merged with the more conscious aspiration to a national literature competing with the other European literatures.
Ettore Li Gotti