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 passé composé 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 être - put it in the imperfect, and bolt on the past participle.

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

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

Compare the three layers directly and the pattern is obvious:

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

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

The auxiliary is the same as the passé composé

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

• elle est partie (she left) -> elle était partie (she had left).
• nous sommes arrivés (we arrived) -> nous étions arrivés (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 passé composé. There is nothing new to memorise.

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

• Elle était partie. (She had left.) - feminine -e.
• Ils étaient arrivés. (They had arrived.) - masculine plural -s.
• Mes soeurs étaient déjà sorties. (My sisters had already gone out.) - feminine plural -es.

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

• Nous nous étions levés tôt. (We had got up early.)
• Elle s'était déjà couchée. (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 mangé la pomme. (I had eaten the apple.) - object follows, no agreement.
• La pomme que j'avais mangée... (The apple I had eaten...) - que = la pomme, a preceding feminine direct object, so mangée.
• Les lettres qu'il avait écrites. (The letters he had written.) - preceding feminine plural object, so écrites.

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 passé composé (or imperfect).

• Quand il est arrivé, elle était déjà partie. (When he arrived, she had already left.)
• Quand je suis arrivé à la gare, le train était déjà parti. (When I got to the station, the train had already left.)
• J'avais fini mes devoirs quand mes amis sont passés. (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 déjà (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 arrivée tard." (She said: "I arrived late.")
• Reported: Elle a dit qu'elle était arrivée tard. (She said she had arrived late.)

The pattern is consistent: a passé composé 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 être + participle).

• Si j'avais su, je ne serais pas venu. (If I had known, I would not have come.)
• Si tu m'avais écouté, tu n'aurais pas fait cette erreur. (If you had listened to me, you would not have made that mistake.)
• Si nous étions partis plus tôt, nous aurions évité 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 rentrés, les invités étaient déjà partis. (When we got back, the guests had already left.) - être verb, subject agreement partis.
• Il m'a montré la maison qu'il avait achetée. (He showed me the house he had bought.) - avoir verb, preceding direct object que = la maison, so achetée.
• Je ne savais pas qu'elle s'était mariée. (I did not know she had got married.) - reflexive, être, subject agreement mariée.
• Elle était fatiguée parce qu'elle n'avait pas dormi. (She was tired because she had not slept.) - avoir verb, no agreement.
• Nous nous étions levés à six heures. (We had got up at six.) - reflexive, subject agreement levés.
• Si j'avais su, je t'aurais prévenu. (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 passé composé, the cure is simply to know your être verbs: it is elle était partie, never "elle avait partie". The second trap is forgetting agreement: with être the participle must match the subject, so it is elles étaient arrivées, not "elles étaient arrivé". With avoir, learners forget the preceding-direct-object agreement, writing "la lettre que j'avais écrit" instead of la lettre que j'avais écrite. A third error is reaching for the plus-que-parfait when a plain passé composé 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 passé composé page covers the auxiliary choice and agreement rules that the plus-que-parfait reuses wholesale.
• The passé composé vs imparfait page sorts out which past tense does what.
• The imparfait page covers the imperfect of avoir and être 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.