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A borrowing from French, the expression idée reçue (i.e., received idea) designates a generally accepted notion or opinion. The plural form is idées reçues.
This expression occurs, for example, in a review of A Son of the Circus (New York: Random House, 1994), by the U.S. novelist John Irving (born 1942)—review by Robert Carver, published in The Scotsman (Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland) of Saturday 24th September 1994 [Weekend section: page 12, column 3]:
I kept trawling for hidden meanings and twists; subtle subtexts which would suddenly convince me I was not just wading through a treacly coagulation of idées recus [sic] and banalities. Alas for me, and alas for John Irving, over these interminable pages, find them I could not.
The expression idée reçue is composed of:
– the feminine noun idée (i.e., idea);
– reçue, the feminine form of the past participle of the verb recevoir (i.e., receive) used as an adjective.
In English, the expression idée reçue seems to have originally referred to Dictionnaire des idées reçues, the title of a posthumous and incomplete dictionary by the French author Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880). This dictionary was first published, from notes compiled by Flaubert, in Œuvres complètes de Gustave Flaubert (Paris: Louis Conard, 1910) [Tome 1, pages 415-452).
These are, in chronological order, the earliest English uses of the expression idée reçue that I have found:
1-: From Flaubert and Henry Monnier: A Study of the Bourgeois, by Edith Melcher, Wellesley College, published in Modern Language Notes (Baltimore (Maryland): Johns Hopkins University Press) of March 1933 [Vol. 48, page 156]:
One of Flaubert’s most remarkable works is the Dictionnaire des idées reçues […]. It is what might be called a pocket manual of human stupidity, a classification of the opinions and judgments which formed the intellectual stock in trade of the bourgeois during the middle years of the nineteenth century. […]
Among the romantics who hated the bourgeois, who studied with fascinated horror his mind, manners, and morals, who sought to avenge themselves on him by painting his portrait for the amusement of his contemporaries, there seems to be no one more closely akin to Flaubert than Henry Monnier, creator of that immortal bourgeois, Joseph Prudhomme. Typical even to his clothes of the self-righteous, narrow-minded middle class, Prudhomme might well represent all that Flaubert despised, and the truisms and clichés with which his sayings abound are the idées reçues of the years when Flaubert was collecting the notes which he organized later into the Dictionnaire.
2-: From a review of The Shadow Across the Page (London: The Cresset Press Limited, 1937), by the British critic and novelist George Walter Stonier (1903-1985)—review by the Irish author Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen (1899-1973), published in The New Statesman and Nation (London, England) of Saturday 13th March 1937 [page 418, column 1]:
Every artist adds year by year to a major unwritten work—like Flaubert’s book about nothing that should stay itself on itself by the inner force of its style. Mr. Stonier chooses to leave his written paragraphs unbridged […].
[…] Mr. Stonier […] has a cult for the monstrous behind the trivial; he, too, lines up idées reçues—note by note he assembles those toppling figures, Mr. and Mrs. Samson and Miss Wilkins. Mr. Samson’s gate blows down and lets dogs in to foul his lawn; Mr. Samson is accosted, is always furious on the telephone, has the insincerity of all good-natured men, snips his hedge in the moonlight, sheds his coat in summer, peers from behind the blind, will not have swedes in the house, believes the churches have failed, crushes moths as he talks, has honeymooned in Naples—but Mrs. Samson was never really keen on it.
3-: From A Piece of My Mind: Reflections at Sixty (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956), by the U.S. literary critic Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) [Reflections on the Teaching of Latin, in chapter 7: Education, page 140]:
I had grown to love Greek, and I continued to take Greek courses through college. I elected a few Latin courses, too, and, exploring the subject for myself, I succeeded in discovering at last the magnificence of Latin poetry. (I may previously have been somewhat prejudiced by having listened to the foolish old idée reçue that Greek literature is the real thing and Latin a second-rate imitation.)
4-: From a letter to the Editor, dated Brownsbank, Biggar, Scotland, Saturday 28th November 1959, written by the Scottish author Christopher Murray Grieve (1892-1978) under the pen name of Hugh MacDiarmid, published in The Scotsman (Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland) of Monday 7th December 1959 [page 10, column 6]—I have not found out the reason for the use of quotations marks in this passage:
I think him [i.e., your reviewer] a Quisling, a snake in the grass, and a journalistic opportunist truckling to the accepted views of the English literary ascendancy, and admirably exemplifying the tactics of “the bourgeois panicking at the thought of his nakedness and making a fussed and pompous escape into the commonplace: the lieu commun and idée reçue.”
5-: From a review of Tanglewood’s Boston Symphony concerts, performed from Friday 3rd to Sunday 5th July 1964—review by Michael Steinberg, published in The Boston Globe (Boston, Massachusetts, USA) of Monday 6th July 1964 [page 20, column 6]—the following is about the Piano Concerto No. 16 in D major, K. 451, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791):
The D major Concerto, K. 451, is a much maligned work.
The standard “idee recue” on it is that it is coldly brilliant and superficial. True, its language is a quasimilitary operatic one, but there is not an idea in it that is not freshly and beautifully invented.
6-: From a review of Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), by the U.S. author Susan Sontag (1933-2004)—review by Alan Pryce-Jones, published in the Kingsport Times-News (Kingsport, Tennessee, USA) of Sunday 13th February 1966 [page 5-B, column 2]:
Susan Sontag excels at stimulation. Her weapon is good sense, her enemy the idee recue.
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