French Passé Simple (Past Historic): How to Recognise It

The passé simple is the past tense of written French narrative: Il entra dans la pièce. - He came into the room. It means what the passé composé means, il est entré, but it lives in novels, tales and history books, not in conversation. You need to recognise it, not produce it.

The whole tense on one screen: the passé simple on the left, the passé composé it stands for on the right.

On the AQA A-level grammar list it is a recognition-only item at AS: you read it, you do not write it.

Where you meet it

The passé simple is a written tense. Nobody uses it at the kitchen table, and a modern French essay does not need it either. It belongs to narrative told from a distance.

The last row is the point: speech takes the passé composé (outside the odd joke or very formal speech). Press reports mostly do too; the passé simple turns up in longer narrative pieces, obituaries and history features.

Here is the opening of Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), the imparfait setting the scene and the passé simple bringing the event:

Nous étions à l'Étude, quand le Proviseur entra...

We were in prep when the headmaster came in. Camus's L'Étranger (1942) is famous partly because it does the opposite and tells a whole novel in the passé composé.

The three ending sets

Nearly every passé simple takes one of three ending sets (venir and tenir, below, are the exception). Regular -er verbs take the a-set; regular -ir and -re verbs take the i-set; many irregulars take the u-set.

The glosses run I spoke, you spoke, he spoke and so on: one simple past for every person. Regular -re verbs follow finir: elle répondit, she answered; ils répondirent, they answered.

The -er verbs keep their spelling tweaks before an a: il commença, he began; nous mangeâmes, we ate.

The fourth type: venir and tenir

Venir, tenir and their families (revenir, devenir, obtenir) build their passé simple on vin- and tin-.

• Elle vint me voir le lendemain. - She came to see me the next day.
• Il tint sa promesse. - He kept his promise.

The irregular stems you will actually meet

The irregulars are what make the tense look foreign. You need about twenty, and only in the third person. Learn to see the infinitive behind the form.

The u-group

Il eut peur. - He got frightened. The passé simple of a state verb often means the state began: eut peur is he took fright, sut is found out.

The i-group

Victor Hugo naquit en 1802. - Victor Hugo was born in 1802. Naquit turns up constantly in history books and biographies, and nothing about it says naître until you have seen it once.

Aller, venir, tenir

Aller, irregular everywhere else, is a regular -er verb in this tense: Elle alla au marché. - She went to the market.

The third person does the work

Narrative is mostly about he, she and they, so il, elle, ils and elles carry nearly every passé simple you will read. The je forms appear in first-person novels (Je compris alors. - Then I understood.), and the tu and vous forms are rare enough to be curiosities.

So learn the third-person forms by sight, and treat the rest as recognisable by their endings.

Homographs: il finit, il dit

For regular -ir verbs, and for a handful of irregulars, the singular passé simple is spelt exactly like the present. The form alone cannot tell you which tense you are reading.

The neighbours decide. Among imparfaits and other passé simple forms the verb is past; among presents, or with a habit marker, it is present.

• Il ferma le livre et dit bonsoir. - He shut the book and said goodnight.
• Chaque soir, il dit bonsoir. - Every evening he says goodnight.
• Elle le vit dans la rue. - She saw him in the street.
• Elle vit à Lyon. - She lives in Lyon.

The plural never matches: ils finirent against ils finissent, ils dirent against ils disent.

The circumflex on nous and vous

The nous and vous endings always carry a circumflex on the vowel. The third person singular never does.

That matters, because the circumflex on a third person is the mark of a different tense. Il fut malade. - He was ill. Bien qu'il fût malade - Although he was ill. The second is the imperfect subjunctive, which is built on the passé simple.

Passé simple + imparfait: the same partnership

The passé simple does the job the passé composé does in speech: it moves the story on, one event at a time. The imparfait keeps its job of describing the scene. Passé composé vs imparfait works here unchanged, with the passé simple in the event slot.

The glosses: It was raining when she went out. I was reading when someone knocked. He opened the door and came in.

A writer picks one of the two for the narrative itself, and the sequencing of past tenses then works as usual. The characters still speak in the passé composé: dialogue inside a passé simple novel is ordinary spoken French.

The passé antérieur: quand il eut fini

The passé simple has a compound partner, the passé antérieur: the passé simple of avoir or être plus a past participle. It marks an action completed just before a passé simple event, usually after quand, lorsque, dès que, après que or à peine.

Read it as the plus-que-parfait: had finished, had left. The same verbs take être as in the passé composé, with the same agreement.

Translating it into English

In a French-to-English translation, each literary tense has a natural English partner. The passé simple is a plain English past, never has done; the imparfait keeps its was doing or used to (and, with depuis, had been doing); the passé antérieur is had done.

The trap is the passé composé habit: il a parlé can be he has spoken, but il parla never can. A passé simple is always cut off from the present, so has is always wrong.

Mistakes English speakers make

These are reading mistakes, because reading is the skill.

And the writing mistake: putting a passé simple in your own A-level essay. Write il a été, not il fut.

What to do next

1. Learn the u-group and i-group tables by sight, third person only.
2. Take any French fairy tale and translate each passé simple into a passé composé as you read.
3. Then read the imperfect subjunctive, which is built on these forms.