Felice Le Monnier

Felice Le Monnier (born Verdun, December 1, 1806 - died in Florence, June 27, 1884) was an Italian publisher.

Born in France to Jean Le Monnier and Jeanne Michaud, he started his military career, whose rigid discipline, however, was ill-suited to his free and inharmonious character. He fled from the Enrico IV school in Paris, and the was expelled.

The father, for punishment and to start it for a profession, entrusted him to a family friend who headed a print shop in Paris. Forced to become a typist, Felice Le Monnier discovered, by accident, his vocation. In a short time he mastered all the secrets of the craft and in a few years became professional.

In the capital of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, Le Monnier did not have difficulty finding work and entered the typography of Passigli and Borghi.

In 1837 he founded with Borghi la Felice Le Monnier and C. It is the origin of the historic Le Monnier publishing house, still active today within the publishing group Mondadori. The new company for the first years worked as a simple typography, but Le Monnier, who in 1840 had reached the full ownership of the entire company, cultivated an ambitious project: to become a publisher. Thus was published in 1841 the first book chosen, chosen and promoted by Felice: The Speeches on the Italian stories of Canon Giuseppe Borghi.

In the following decades, Le Monnier, while never interrupting the printing business on behalf of third parties (practices, among other things, common to all 19th century Italian publishers), built one of the most prestigious editorials in Italy, always coherently guided by a precise and modern philosophy, at the same time commercial and cultural. The Monnier was addressing the new broad public of the middle classes, the new emerging, unity and patriotic bourgeoisie. His choices followed the design, clear from the beginning, to publish works that would satisfy, as he himself stated, "the political concept and the literary criterion", that they associate patriotic spirit and artistic value. Frenchman Le Monnier then became a protagonist of the Risorgimento feelings of moderate Italy.

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