The French Pluperfect (le plus-que-parfait)

The plus-que-parfait is the "had done" tense. It is the past before the past: you are already narrating in a past tense, and you need to reach further back to something that had already happened. English does this with "had" plus a participle - "I had eaten", "she had left" - and French does it the same way, with one extra layer of machinery.

The good news is that you already own most of that machinery. The plus-que-parfait is simply the passe compose with the auxiliary moved into the imperfect. The auxiliary choice and the agreement rules do not change at all.

How to form it

Take the auxiliary - avoir or etre - put it in the imperfect, and bolt on the past participle.

manger (avoir verb), imperfect of avoir + participle mange:

partir (etre verb), imperfect of etre + participle parti:

Compare the three layers directly and the pattern is obvious:

• je mange (I eat) - present.
• j'ai mange (I ate / I have eaten) - passe compose, present of avoir.
• j'avais mange (I had eaten) - plus-que-parfait, imperfect of avoir.

The only thing that moves is the auxiliary: ai becomes avais, est becomes etait. Everything else stays put.

The auxiliary is the same as the passe compose

You do not learn a new list. The verbs that take etre in the passe compose take etre here too: the movement and change-of-state verbs (aller, venir, partir, arriver, entrer, sortir, monter, descendre, rester, tomber, naitre, mourir, devenir) and all the reflexives. Everything else takes avoir.

• elle est partie (she left) -> elle etait partie (she had left).
• nous sommes arrives (we arrived) -> nous etions arrives (we had arrived).
• j'ai fini (I finished) -> j'avais fini (I had finished).

Past-participle agreement: identical rules

The agreement rules carry over wholesale from the passe compose. There is nothing new to memorise.

With etre, the participle agrees with the subject in gender and number:

• Elle etait partie. (She had left.) - feminine -e.
• Ils etaient arrives. (They had arrived.) - masculine plural -s.
• Mes soeurs etaient deja sorties. (My sisters had already gone out.) - feminine plural -es.

Reflexive verbs take etre and agree with the subject in the normal case:

• Nous nous etions leves tot. (We had got up early.)
• Elle s'etait deja couchee. (She had already gone to bed.)

With avoir, the participle is invariable unless a direct object comes before the verb, in which case it agrees with that preceding direct object:

• J'avais mange la pomme. (I had eaten the apple.) - object follows, no agreement.
• La pomme que j'avais mangee... (The apple I had eaten...) - que = la pomme, a preceding feminine direct object, so mangee.
• Les lettres qu'il avait ecrites. (The letters he had written.) - preceding feminine plural object, so ecrites.

Use 1: the action that came first

This is the everyday use. When two things happen in the past and you want to make clear that one was already finished before the other, the earlier one goes in the plus-que-parfait and the later one in the passe compose (or imperfect).

• Quand il est arrive, elle etait deja partie. (When he arrived, she had already left.)
• Quand je suis arrive a la gare, le train etait deja parti. (When I got to the station, the train had already left.)
• J'avais fini mes devoirs quand mes amis sont passes. (I had finished my homework when my friends came by.)
• Elle a dit qu'elle n'avait jamais vu la mer. (She said she had never seen the sea.)

The word deja (already) and ne... jamais (never) sit very naturally with this tense, because both point back to a stretch of time before the main past event.

Use 2: reported speech

When you report what someone said and the original statement was itself in the past, the reported version steps one tense further back, into the plus-que-parfait. This mirrors the English "he said he had finished".

• Direct: Il a dit: "J'ai fini." (He said: "I have finished.")
• Reported: Il a dit qu'il avait fini. (He said he had finished.)
• Direct: Elle a dit: "Je suis arrivee tard." (She said: "I arrived late.")
• Reported: Elle a dit qu'elle etait arrivee tard. (She said she had arrived late.)

The pattern is consistent: a passe compose in the original becomes a plus-que-parfait when reported in the past, just as a present becomes an imperfect and a future becomes a conditionnel.

Use 3: si j'avais su - regret about the past

The plus-que-parfait is half of the third type of si-clause, the one used for regret about the past. The condition goes in the plus-que-parfait and the result in the past conditional (the conditionnel of avoir or etre + participle).

• Si j'avais su, je ne serais pas venu. (If I had known, I would not have come.)
• Si tu m'avais ecoute, tu n'aurais pas fait cette erreur. (If you had listened to me, you would not have made that mistake.)
• Si nous etions partis plus tot, nous aurions evite les embouteillages. (If we had left earlier, we would have avoided the traffic.)

Si j'avais su (if I had known) is worth learning as a fixed phrase - it is the standard French expression of "had I known". Note the elision: si becomes s' only before il or ils, never before j' - so it stays si j'avais su, but s'il avait su. The full three-type system is on the si-clauses page.

Worked examples

• Quand nous sommes rentres, les invites etaient deja partis. (When we got back, the guests had already left.) - etre verb, subject agreement partis.
• Il m'a montre la maison qu'il avait achetee. (He showed me the house he had bought.) - avoir verb, preceding direct object que = la maison, so achetee.
• Je ne savais pas qu'elle s'etait mariee. (I did not know she had got married.) - reflexive, etre, subject agreement mariee.
• Elle etait fatiguee parce qu'elle n'avait pas dormi. (She was tired because she had not slept.) - avoir verb, no agreement.
• Nous nous etions leves a six heures. (We had got up at six.) - reflexive, subject agreement leves.
• Si j'avais su, je t'aurais prevenu. (If I had known, I would have warned you.) - plus-que-parfait in the si-clause, past conditional in the result.

Common mistakes English speakers make

The commonest slip is choosing the wrong auxiliary - but since it is the same auxiliary as the passe compose, the cure is simply to know your etre verbs: it is elle etait partie, never "elle avait partie". The second trap is forgetting agreement: with etre the participle must match the subject, so it is elles etaient arrivees, not "elles etaient arrive". With avoir, learners forget the preceding-direct-object agreement, writing "la lettre que j'avais ecrit" instead of la lettre que j'avais ecrite. A third error is reaching for the plus-que-parfait when a plain passe compose is enough: only use it when there genuinely is an earlier past point to anchor to. Finally, in the si-clause of regret, do not put the conditional after si - it is si j'avais su, je serais venu, never "si j'aurais su". The plus-que-parfait belongs after si; the conditional belongs in the result.

See also

• The passe compose page covers the auxiliary choice and agreement rules that the plus-que-parfait reuses wholesale.
• The passe compose vs imparfait page sorts out which past tense does what.
• The imparfait page covers the imperfect of avoir and etre that builds this tense.
• The si-clauses page sets out the full three-type conditional system, including si j'avais su.
• The conditionnel page covers the past conditional used in the result clause for regret.
• The French grammar cheatsheet covers the whole A1-B2 grammar map at a glance.