At the time of Flaubert's death, it was unclear whether he intended eventually to publish it separately, or as an appendix to his unfinished novel Bouvard et Pécuchet.
Flaubert's two main themes are the "castigation of the cliché"[2] and "an attack on misinformation, prejudice and incoherence as regards matters of fact".
As a child, he had amused himself by writing down the absurd utterances of a friend of his mother's, and over the course of his career he speculated as to the best format for a compilation of stupidities.
In a letter to Louis Bouilhet from 1850, Flaubert wrote: Such a book, with a good preface in which the motive would be stated to be the desire to bring the nation back to Tradition, Order and Sound Conventions—all this so phrased that the reader would not know whether or not his leg was being pulled—such a book would certainly be unusual, even likely to succeed, because it would be entirely up to the minute.
I should sacrifice the great men to all the nitwits, the martyrs to all the executioners, and do it in a style carried to the wildest pitch—fireworks... After reading the book, one would be afraid to talk, for fear of using one of the phrases in it.