Le Passé Composé

The passé composé is the past tense of spoken French. It is what you use when you tell a friend what you did last weekend, when you write a text message about your day, when you describe a single completed event.

Almost every modern French sentence about the past will contain a passé composé. Learn to form it, learn to recognise it, and you have unlocked roughly half of all French past-tense usage.

What it looks like

Every passé composé is made of two pieces.

auxiliary verb (in the present tense) + past participle of the main verb

The two auxiliaries are avoir (to have) and être (to be). Most verbs use avoir. A small but important set of verbs use être.

J'ai mangé une pomme.       I ate an apple.        (avoir + mangé)
Tu as parlé.                 You spoke.             (avoir + parlé)
Elle a fini.                 She finished.          (avoir + fini)

Je suis allé.                I went.                (être + allé)
Nous sommes arrivés.         We arrived.            (être + arrivés)
Elle est née en 1950.        She was born in 1950.  (être + née)

The English translations show that French uses one form to cover what English splits into the simple past (I ate) and the present perfect (I have eaten). The passé composé does both jobs.

Forming the past participle

For regular verbs, the past participle follows the verb’s ending:

A handful of common irregular participles are worth memorising on day one. You will see them in every text:

When to use être instead of avoir

The big learner trap is choosing the right auxiliary. Most verbs take avoir. A small group takes être.

There are three rules:

1. Reflexive verbs (verbs with se) always take être. Je me suis levé. — I got up.

2. Verbs of movement and change of state take être. The classic mnemonic is DR. and MRS. VANDERTRAMP — a memory aid that names the fourteen common ones:

   Verb	Meaning
   Devenir	to become
   Revenir	to come back
   Monter	to go up
   Rester	to stay
   Sortir	to go out
   Venir	to come
   Aller	to go
   Naître	to be born
   Descendre	to go down
   Entrer	to enter
   Rentrer	to come home
   Tomber	to fall
   Retourner	to return
   Arriver	to arrive
   Mourir	to die
   Partir	to leave

   Most of these involve motion, arrival, or transformation. Je suis tombé (I fell). Elle est partie (she left).

3. Everything else takes avoir.

Past-participle agreement

This is the part that trips up almost every learner. The short version:

• With être (movement verbs and reflexives), the past participle agrees in gender and number with the subject. Elle est allée. (feminine subject → allée) Ils sont arrivés. (masculine plural → arrivés) Nous sommes parties. (feminine plural → parties)

• With avoir, the past participle does not agree with the subject. It only agrees with a direct object that comes before the verb. J’ai mangé la pomme. (object after verb → no agreement) La pomme que j’ai mangée. (object la pomme moved before via the relative que → agreement: mangée)

The agreement-with-avoir rule has its own page: see accord-du-participe-passé once you’ve digested the basics here.

Negation

Put ne … pas around the auxiliary, not the participle.

Je n'ai pas mangé.         I haven't eaten.
Elle n'est pas venue.       She didn't come.

Questions

Three options, in increasing formality:

Tu as mangé ?               (intonation)
Est-ce que tu as mangé ?    (formal-ish)
As-tu mangé ?               (literary, inversion)

In speech, almost everyone uses the first. In writing, the second is safe. The third is for novels.

How writers use it

The passé composé is the spoken past, but it appears in fiction whenever a writer wants the voice of an ordinary speaker — a first-person narrator, dialogue, an interior monologue.

Camus’s L’Étranger is the most famous example in French literature. Camus could have used the literary passé simple, the way Flaubert and Hugo do. He didn’t. He chose passé composé throughout the narration to give Meursault the flat, affectless voice of someone telling a story across a kitchen table. The first sentence — Aujourd’hui, maman est morte — is the moment French literary fiction discovered the spoken past as a tool. Every novel narrated in passé composé since then is in conversation with that opening.

Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, published a year later, opens with the same spoken voice, paired with imparfait for the childhood background.

In dialogue, passé composé is universal. A character who says J’ai vu Charles hier (I saw Charles yesterday) sounds like a real person. A character who says Je vis Charles hier (I saw Charles yesterday in passé simple) sounds like a chess piece in a Hugo novel.

What you don’t need to do

You don’t need to choose between passé composé and passé simple in your own writing. Use passé composé. Always. Native speakers under sixty will go their whole lives without producing the nous- or vous-form of passé simple in speech. The literary tense is for reading, not writing.

You don’t need to decide on the spot whether a verb takes avoir or être. Memorise the DR-MRS-VANDERTRAMP list and the rule for reflexives. Everything else takes avoir.

You don’t need to handle past-participle agreement perfectly at A1. The agreement rules with être (gender, number) come fast. The agreement rules with avoir take months to internalise. Native French children get this wrong until adolescence; adult learners are forgiven for getting it wrong at A2.

Where you’ll meet it in the library

The passé composé appears throughout these books on Storica:

• L’Étranger (B1) — Camus’s landmark choice. Almost every narrative verb is passé composé.
• Le Petit Prince (A1) — paired with imparfait throughout. The cleanest first encounter.
• Candide (B1) — the original is passé simple, but Storica’s B1 adaptation uses passé composé so a learner can read Voltaire without first mastering the literary tense.
• La Belle France (A1) — Storica original at A1; almost everything in the past is passé composé.
• Any dialogue in any French book at any level. Characters speak in passé composé.