Passé Simple – French Simple Past

“Ne t’inquiète pas”, dit-elle, “je courrai jusque chez Grand’mère sans m’arrêter.” Petit Chaperon Rouge embrassa sa maman et s’en alla. La petite fille commença son long voyage a travers la forêt.

“Don’t worry”, she said. “I will run to Grandma’s without stopping.” Little Red Riding Hood kissed her mother and left. The little girl started her long trip through the forest.

When learning the past tense in French you almost certainly first learned le passé composé, which is a compound tense. As you know, with le passé composé you first need un verbe auxiliaire (auxiliary verb) – either avoir or être, and then you need le participe passé (past participle).

So then why aren’t the above verbs conjugated in le passé composé as such: … a embrassé … est partie … a commencé? Well, if this wasn’t a literary text and instead an oral story or informal letter, it would read exactly like that.

So le passé simple is instead a literary past-tense reserved for formal writing, even children’s stories. Unless you’d like to become a journalist or novelist in French, you most likely will never need to know how to form the le passé simple, but you will need to recognize it in text. So, let’s look at the rules:

ER verbs

Drop the ‘er’ and add the following endings: ai, as, a, âmes, âtes, èrent.

Par example:

J’aidai Nous aidâmes

Tu aidas Vous aidâtes

Il/Elle aida Ils/Elles aidèrent

IR and RE verbs

Drop the ‘ir’ or ‘re’ and add the following endings: is, is, it, îmes, îtes, irent.

Par example:

Je finis Nous finîmes

Tu finis Vous finîtes

Il/Elle finit Ils/Elles finirent

Irregular Verbs

Yes, there are irregular verbs even in the past simple. Generally these irregular verb stems will end in ‘i’ or ‘u’ and will add the following endings: s, s, t, ^mes, ^tes, rent.

Here are some irregular verb stems (notice how a lot of them are the past participle of the verb in the passé composé):

avoir (to have): eu-

boire (to drink): bu-

connaître (to know): connu-

construire (to construct): construis-

courir (to run): couru-