French Past Subjunctive (Subjonctif Passé): Forms and Uses

The past subjunctive is the subjunctive for an event that is already over: Je suis content que tu sois venu. - I am glad you came. It is the present subjunctive of avoir or être plus a past participle. The triggers are the ones you know; only the timing is new.

Necessity, doubt and emotion and the conjunctions decide whether you need a subjunctive. This page decides which one.

How to form it

Take the passé composé and put its auxiliary into the present subjunctive.

The glosses: that I did, that I left, and so on down. Watch the avoir column: it has no r anywhere and no i after the y (ayons, ayez), and il takes ait, never est.

The auxiliary choice and the agreement are the passé composé's:

The one question: is it over?

The trigger tells you to use a subjunctive. It does not tell you which. One question does: is the event in the que clause already over?

The glosses, row by row: she has to leave / she has to be gone by noon; although she works hard / although she worked hard; I am sorry he is leaving / I am sorry he has left.

Without the past subjunctive each pair would collapse into one sentence. The tense of the clause is what says when.

Avant que: the deadline

Avant que always takes the subjunctive, because its event has not happened yet. The past subjunctive still has a job here: it says the event will be finished by the deadline.

• Partons avant qu'il arrive. - Let us leave before he arrives.
• Partons avant qu'il ait fini son discours. - Let us leave before he has finished his speech.

Learn one phrase whole: avant qu'il soit trop tard - before it is too late. You will also see it with a ne that negates nothing, the ne explétif: avant qu'il ne soit trop tard. The conjunctions page covers it, and jusqu'à ce que (until) works the same way.

A past main verb changes nothing

This is the trap, because it looks like the backshift in reported speech and behaves nothing like it. Put the main verb in the past and the clause still times itself against the main verb.

Both are correct modern French, and they mean different things. A past main verb never obliges you to write a past subjunctive.

Two tenses, not four

Reference grammars list four subjunctive tenses. Everyday modern French uses two, and lets them cover for the other pair.

You still need to recognise the old pair in older literature and in writers who enjoy the effect. A third-person verb ending in -ât, -ît or -ût with a circumflex, straight after que, is usually an imperfect subjunctive (the exceptions are ordinary presents such as qu'il connaît and qu'il plaît): read qu'il vînt as qu'il vienne and carry on. You do not need to write one: outside deliberately literary prose it sounds stilted.

One subject: the perfect infinitive

When both halves have the same subject, French drops the que clause and uses a perfect infinitive: avoir or être in the infinitive plus the participle. This is the same-subject rule, applied to a finished event.

In the negative, ne pas usually goes in front of the whole infinitive: de ne pas avoir répondu. (Formal writing also has de n'avoir pas répondu.)

Mistakes English speakers make

And do not match the main verb: j'étais content qu'il vienne is right when he was still on his way.

What to do next

1. Say three things you are glad happened this week, with je suis content que and a past subjunctive.
2. Say one about yourself with je suis content d'avoir or d'être.
3. Then read the subjunctive in relative clauses, where the mood becomes a choice.