The French Past Subjunctive

Everything you have learned about when the subjunctive fires still holds. Necessity and will, doubt and emotion, the fixed conjunctions: the trigger lists are unchanged, and this page adds nothing to them.

What it adds is a second tense to put in the clause once a trigger has fired. Until now you have had one option, the present subjunctive, and you have been using it for events that were already over, because you had nothing else. The subjonctif passé is the something else.

Formation

Present subjunctive of avoir or être + past participle. That is the entire rule.

Two things to notice in that table. The avoir column is the one people misspell: aie, aies, ait, ayons, ayez, aient, with no -r- anywhere and a silent ending in four of the six. And the auxiliary choice and the participle agreement are exactly the passé composé's, so qu'elle soit partie takes its -e and qu'ils soient partis takes its -s.

Reflexives take être, as always: qu'il se soit levé, que nous nous soyons trompés.

The one rule: timing inside the clause

The trigger decides whether you need a subjunctive. It does not decide which one. That is settled by a single question: is the event in the que clause already complete?

• Je suis content que tu viennes. (I am glad you are coming.) - still to happen.
• Je suis content que tu sois venu. (I am glad you came.) - over and done with.

Same trigger, same main verb, same subject. The only difference is when the coming happened, and the tense of the subjunctive is the only thing in the sentence saying so. That is why the past subjunctive matters: without it, half your sentences are ambiguous.

More of the same pattern:

• Je doute qu'il comprenne. (I doubt he understands.) / Je doute qu'il ait compris. (I doubt he has understood.)
• Il faut qu'elle parte. (She has to leave.) / Il faut qu'elle soit partie avant midi. (She has to be gone by noon.)
• Bien qu'elle travaille dur, elle échoue. (Although she works hard, she is failing.) / Bien qu'elle ait travaillé dur, elle a échoué. (Although she worked hard, she failed.)

The main verb does not decide

This is the trap, and it catches good students because it looks like the backshift and behaves nothing like it.

In reported speech, a past reporting verb drags the subordinate tense backwards. The subjunctive does no such thing. Put the main verb in the past and the clause still times itself against the main verb, not against the calendar:

• J'étais content qu'il vienne. (I was glad he was coming.) - the coming had not happened yet at that moment. Present subjunctive.
• J'étais content qu'il soit venu. (I was glad he had come.) - it had. Past subjunctive.

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

You may hear that classical French would have used an imperfect subjunctive in the first of those, giving j'étais content qu'il vînt. It would have. Nobody writes that now, which brings us to the tense count.

Why two, when the books list four

Reference grammars set out four subjunctive tenses: présent, passé, imparfait and plus-que-parfait. Two of them are museum pieces.

The imperfect subjunctive died of its own forms. Que je fisse, qu'il vînt, que nous eussions are hard to say, easy to mock, and were already retreating by 1900. French did the sensible thing and let the present subjunctive cover both jobs, which is why j'étais content qu'il vienne is now correct even though the timing is past.

You still need to recognise them, because they turn up in anything written before the war and in writers who enjoy the effect. A verb ending in -ât, -ît or -ût with a circumflex, sitting after a que, is an imperfect subjunctive; read it as a present subjunctive and carry on. Never produce one in your own writing: an examiner reads it as a mistake with a hat on.

avant que and the deadline

Avant que and jusqu'à ce que deserve their own paragraph, because they are the one place where both subjunctive tenses are available and the choice is genuinely subtle.

The event after avant que has not happened when you speak, so you might think the past subjunctive could never apply. It does, and what it adds is completion by the deadline:

• Partons avant qu'il arrive. (Let us leave before he arrives.) - the arrival itself is the deadline.
• Partons avant qu'il ait fini son discours. (Let us leave before he has finished his speech.) - the deadline is the speech being over.

And avant qu'il soit trop tard (before it is too late) is worth learning whole. It is the most quoted subjunctive phrase in the language, it uses the present subjunctive of être, and it will earn its place in an essay.

Note that avant que is often written with a ne explétif - avant qu'il ne soit trop tard - which negates nothing at all. The conjunctions page covers it.

The same-subject escape hatch still applies

If both halves of the sentence have the same subject, French does not want a que clause at all, and the past subjunctive is replaced by a perfect infinitive:

• Not je suis content que je sois venu but je suis content d'être venu. (I am glad I came.)
• Not elle regrette qu'elle ne t'ait pas prévenu but elle regrette de ne pas t'avoir prévenu. (She is sorry she did not tell you.)

This is the same-subject rule you already know, applied to a compound tense. The infinitive goes into its perfect form, and the negation sits in front of the whole thing.

Worked examples

• Je ne crois pas qu'ils aient menti. (I do not think they lied.) - negated croire, so subjunctive, and the lying is over.
• C'est dommage que vous soyez partis si tôt. (It is a shame you left so early.) - être auxiliary, plural agreement.
• Elle est ravie que je me sois excusé. (She is delighted that I apologised.) - reflexive, so être.
• Je regrette qu'elle ne m'ait pas prévenu. (I am sorry she did not tell me.) - negation wrapping the auxiliary.
• Il faut que nous ayons fini avant midi. (We have to have finished by noon.) - necessity plus completion, which the present subjunctive could not express.
• Bien qu'il ait plu toute la journée, nous sommes sortis. (Although it rained all day, we went out.)
• Je suis surpris qu'elle soit repartie si vite. (I am surprised she left again so quickly.) - agreement on the participle.

Common mistakes English speakers make

The first is matching the subjunctive to the main verb's tense instead of to the timing. J'étais content qu'il soit venu is fine when he had already come, but if he was on his way it should be j'étais content qu'il vienne. Time the clause, not the sentence.

The second is the spelling of avoir. It is aie, aies, ait, ayons, ayez, aient - and the one that goes wrong most is qu'il ait, written as qu'il est or qu'il a. Read your subjunctives back and check the auxiliary is a subjunctive at all.

The third is dropping the agreement because the sentence already feels complicated. Qu'elle soit partie, qu'ils soient venus, qu'elle se soit levée: être verbs and reflexives agree here exactly as they do in the passé composé.

The fourth is writing a que clause when both subjects are the same. Je suis content que je sois venu is not merely clumsy, it is wrong: je suis content d'être venu.

The fifth is reaching for an imperfect subjunctive because a grammar table listed one. Qu'il vînt in a modern essay reads as a joke or an error. Use the present.

Finally, do not assume the past subjunctive is rare. Every emotion verb about something that has happened needs one, and "I am glad that you came" is not an exotic sentence.

See also

• The present subjunctive formation - the forms of avoir and être that build this tense.
• The subjunctive after doubt, emotion and opinion - the triggers, unchanged by the tense choice.
• The subjunctive after conjunctions - avant que, jusqu'à ce que and the ne explétif.
• Infinitive or subjunctive - the same-subject rule and the perfect infinitive that replaces this tense.
• The passé composé - the auxiliary choice and the agreement rules reused here.
• Subjunctive or indicative - the decision system for the cases where both moods compete.
• The French grammar cheatsheet - the whole grammar map at a glance.