L'Imparfait

The imparfait is the past tense for everything that wasn’t a single event.

Where the passé composé and the passé simple describe completed actions — I ate, she went out, he closed the door — the imparfait describes the world those actions happened in. Backgrounds. Habits. The way things were. Weather, age, mood, the slow ticking of an afternoon. It is the tense of the camera lingering before the action starts.

If you only know one French past tense, you will sound like a tourist. If you know the passé composé and the imparfait, you will pass.

Forms

The imparfait is one of the most regular tenses in French. There is one set of endings, and almost every verb plays nicely.

To form it: take the nous-form of the present tense, drop -ons, and add the imparfait endings.

Examples

parler (to speak) — present nous parlons, stem parl-

finir (to finish) — present nous finissons, stem finiss-

vendre (to sell) — present nous vendons, stem vend-

The one irregular: être

Être doesn’t follow the rule. Memorise the forms — you’ll need them constantly.

When to use it

There are four classic uses. Most learners memorise them in this order.

1. Background description

The setting before something happens. Weather, time, place, mood, what people looked like.

Il faisait nuit. Le vent soufflait dans les arbres. It was night. The wind was blowing in the trees.

2. Habits and repeated actions

Things that used to happen. The English used to and would (in habit-sense) almost always translate to imparfait.

Quand j’étais enfant, j’allais à la plage tous les étés. When I was a child, I used to go to the beach every summer.

3. Ongoing actions interrupted by another action

A long action in progress, suddenly broken by a discrete event. The long thing is imparfait. The breaking event is passé composé (or passé simple in literary text).

Je dormais quand le téléphone a sonné. I was sleeping when the phone rang.

This is the most distinctive imparfait function in narrative.

4. States of being and mind

Age, feelings, beliefs, physical conditions, ongoing emotional states.

Il avait dix ans. Il était heureux. He was ten. He was happy.

The pair: imparfait + passé composé/simple

This is the central skill. French past-tense paragraphs constantly alternate between the two registers.

Imparfait describes the world. Passé composé / passé simple moves it.

Watch what happens in this constructed example:

Le ciel était gris et il pleuvait. Marie lisait un livre dans son fauteuil. Elle avait l’air fatiguée. Soudain, on a frappé à la porte.

The sky was grey and it was raining. Marie was reading a book in her armchair. She looked tired. Suddenly, someone knocked at the door.

Three sentences of imparfait set the scene. One passé composé breaks it. This rhythm — long establishment, brief disruption — is the structural pattern of French narrative prose.

Flaubert’s opening line of Madame Bovary uses exactly this pattern in a single sentence: Nous étions à l’Étude, quand le Proviseur entra. The classroom is in imparfait. The headmaster’s arrival, in passé simple, breaks it.

Quirks worth knowing

Spelling changes for -ger and -cer verbs

To preserve the soft sound, -ger verbs add an e before a in some forms, and -cer verbs use ç:

manger: je mangeais, nous mangions commencer: je commençais, nous commencions

Si clauses (hypothetical)

In hypothetical constructions, si clauses about the present unreal use imparfait, even though they’re not strictly past:

Si j’avais le temps, je viendrais. If I had the time, I would come.

This is one of the few places where imparfait does not refer to past time.

Polite imperfect

In service interactions, you’ll hear:

Je voulais une baguette, s’il vous plaît. I wanted a baguette, please.

Saying je veux (present, I want) is fine but slightly blunt. Je voulais (imparfait, literally I was wanting) is the politer register. This is the only past-tense usage that doesn’t actually refer to the past.

What you don’t need to do

You don’t need to translate imparfait into one English form. It maps to was/were doing, used to do, sometimes did, sometimes would do — depending on context. Don’t try to fit it into one English bucket. It has its own bucket.

You don’t need to decide between imparfait and passé composé through grammar charts. The split is semantic, not formal. After enough reading, the question was this a discrete event or a state of the world? becomes intuitive. Until then, when in doubt, ask: can I add “used to” or “was -ing” in English? If yes, imparfait. If you’d say did or has done, passé composé.

Where you’ll meet it in the library

The imparfait is everywhere. Literally every French book on the shelf uses it for the descriptive layer of its prose:

• Madame Bovary (B2) — Flaubert’s slow-camera passages live in imparfait. Every passage describing Charles’s clothes, the country roads, the table set for dinner is in imparfait.
• Le Petit Prince (A1) — the gentlest first exposure. The narrator’s childhood, the descriptions of the planets and the fox, the scene-setting of the desert — all imparfait.
• L’Étranger (B1) — Camus uses imparfait against passé composé. Read the funeral scene to see how the inner state (“il faisait chaud”, “j’avais sommeil”) sits in imparfait while the actions advance in passé composé.
• Candide (B1) — Voltaire’s static descriptions and habitual states.
• Notre-Dame de Paris (B2) — Hugo’s panoramic descriptions of medieval Paris run for pages in imparfait before the action verbs in passé simple kick in.