Passé Composé in French

In Brief

The passé composé is the main tense for completed past events in everyday French. Form it with the present tense of avoir or être plus a past participle (the verb form used in combinations such as mangé or fini): J'ai mangé (“I ate”) and Elle est partie (“She left”). Most verbs take avoir; a smaller group of movement/change-of-state verbs and all reflexive verbs take être.

Overview

The passé composé lets you report an event as completed: what someone did, what happened, or what changed. You will use it for last night's dinner, a journey, a conversation, and almost any sequence of finished actions. It appears at A2 because it is the first broadly useful French past tense, but it remains essential at every level.

The name literally means “compound past”: it contains two verb forms. The first is an auxiliary (a helping verb), either avoir or être. The second is the past participle of the main verb. In nous avons fini, avons is the auxiliary and fini carries the meaning “finished.” English sometimes uses a similar-looking construction in “we have finished,” but the match is not exact: French nous avons fini hier normally means “we finished yesterday,” not only “we have finished.”

The beginner rule is manageable: choose the auxiliary, form the participle, and put them together. Agreement and object-pronoun rules add detail later. Learn the basic pattern first, then use the advanced sections as a reference.

How It Works

The basic formula

Subject + present-tense auxiliary + past participle

• J'ai regardé le film. — I watched the film.
• Nous sommes arrivés tôt. — We arrived early.

The auxiliary changes with the subject; the past participle usually stays in one recognizable form, although agreement can alter its ending.

Present forms of the auxiliaries

Subject	avoir	être
je	ai	suis
tu	as	es
il / elle / on	a	est
nous	avons	sommes
vous	avez	êtes
ils / elles	ont	sont

Before a vowel sound, je contracts: j'ai. Do not translate the auxiliary separately. In j'ai parlé, the whole unit means “I spoke” or “I have spoken,” depending on context.

Forming regular past participles

For regular verbs, replace the infinitive ending (the dictionary-form ending) as follows:

Infinitive group	Change	Example	Past participle
verbs in -er	-er → -é	parler	parlé
many verbs in -ir	-ir → -i	finir	fini
many verbs in -re	-re → -u	vendre	vendu

The accent matters: parlé is not parler. After the auxiliary, use the participle, never the infinitive: j'ai parlé, not j'ai parler.

Many common participles are irregular and need to be learned as vocabulary:

Infinitive	Past participle	Meaning
avoir	eu	had
être	été	been/was
faire	fait	done/made
prendre	pris	taken
mettre	mis	put
voir	vu	seen
lire	lu	read
boire	bu	drunk
devoir	dû	had to/owed
pouvoir	pu	been able to
vouloir	voulu	wanted
venir	venu	come

Choosing avoir or être

Most verbs use avoir, including manger, parler, finir, voir, prendre, and faire:

• Tu as compris. — You understood.
• Ils ont pris le train. — They took the train.

Use être with all reflexive verbs—verbs containing a pronoun such as se in the infinitive—and with a limited group of common intransitive verbs (verbs used here without a direct object):

Common être verbs	Past participle
aller (go)	allé
arriver (arrive)	arrivé
entrer (enter/go in)	entré
partir (leave)	parti
venir (come)	venu
revenir (come back)	revenu
naître (be born)	né
mourir (die)	mort
rester (stay)	resté
tomber (fall)	tombé
monter (go up)	monté
descendre (go down)	descendu
rentrer (return/go home)	rentré
retourner (return/go back)	retourné
sortir (go out)	sorti
passer (pass/go by)	passé

Traditional mnemonics such as “DR MRS VANDERTRAMP” can help recall many of these, but learning each verb in a short sentence is more reliable. Derivatives normally follow their base verb: venir → devenir, revenir.

Some movement verbs switch to avoir when they take a direct object (the person or thing directly affected by the action):

• Elle est sortie. — She went out.
• Elle a sorti son téléphone. — She took out her phone.
• Nous sommes montés. — We went up.
• Nous avons monté les valises. — We carried the suitcases up.

Agreement with être

With être, the participle normally agrees with the subject in grammatical gender and number. Add -e for a feminine singular subject, -s for a masculine or mixed plural, and -es for a feminine plural. These endings are often silent in speech but visible in writing.

Subject	Example	Ending
Paul	Paul est arrivé.	masculine singular: no added ending
Léa	Léa est arrivée.	feminine singular: -e
Paul et Marc	Ils sont arrivés.	masculine plural: -s
Léa et Inès	Elles sont arrivées.	feminine plural: -es

With avoir, the beginner rule is no agreement with the subject: Elle a mangé and Ils ont mangé. A later exception involving a preceding direct object appears under “Beyond the Basics.”

Reflexive verbs

A reflexive pronoun refers back to the subject, as in se lever (“to get up”). Place it before the auxiliary:

• Je me suis levé(e). — I got up.
• Elle s'est couchée. — She went to bed.
• Nous nous sommes dépêchés. — We hurried.

At A2, use subject agreement in straightforward reflexive sentences. More exact agreement rules depend on whether the reflexive pronoun functions as a direct or indirect object; those are covered later below.

Negation and questions

In a simple negative sentence, ne ... pas surrounds the auxiliary, not the participle:

• Je n'ai pas compris. — I did not understand.
• Elle n'est pas venue. — She did not come.
• Nous ne nous sommes pas arrêtés. — We did not stop.

Other negative words follow the same basic placement: Il n'a jamais voyagé (“He has never traveled”) and Je n'ai rien vu (“I saw nothing”). In everyday speech, speakers often omit ne: J'ai pas compris. Standard writing keeps it.

Questions can use normal spoken word order with rising intonation, est-ce que, or formal inversion:

• Tu as fini ?
• Est-ce que tu as fini ?
• As-tu fini ?

Object pronouns normally come before the auxiliary: Je l'ai vu (“I saw him/it”), Elle nous a appelés (“She called us”), and Tu en as acheté (“You bought some”).

Examples in Context

French	English	Note
J'ai mangé la pizza.	I ate the pizza.	Regular -er participle with avoir
Nous avons fini le travail.	We finished the work.	Regular -ir participle
Tu as vendu ton vélo ?	Did you sell your bike?	Spoken question; regular -re participle
Hier, elle a pris le bus.	Yesterday, she took the bus.	Irregular pris
On a vu un excellent film.	We saw an excellent film.	Everyday on meaning “we”
Je n'ai pas compris la question.	I didn't understand the question.	Negation surrounds ai
Il est parti à six heures.	He left at six o'clock.	être verb, masculine singular
Elle est arrivée en retard.	She arrived late.	Feminine agreement in arrivée
Nous sommes allés à Paris en train.	We went to Paris by train.	Masculine or mixed-group plural
Mes sœurs sont revenues dimanche.	My sisters came back on Sunday.	Feminine plural agreement
Je me suis levée tôt.	I got up early.	Speaker is female; reflexive verb
Ils se sont rencontrés au travail.	They met at work.	Reciprocal/reflexive construction
Elle a sorti ses clés de son sac.	She took her keys out of her bag.	sortir takes avoir with an object
D'abord, j'ai appelé Léa, puis je suis sorti.	First I called Léa, then I went out.	Sequence of completed events; male speaker

Common Mistakes

Using the infinitive after the auxiliary

• Wrong: J'ai manger au restaurant.
• Right: J'ai mangé au restaurant.
• Why: The auxiliary must be followed by a past participle. For regular -er verbs, write -é, not -er.

Choosing être for every movement verb

• Wrong: J'ai allé au marché.
• Right: Je suis allé(e) au marché.
• Why: Aller belongs to the limited group that takes être. But movement alone is not a complete rule: voyager and marcher, for example, take avoir.

Forgetting agreement with être

• Wrong: Marie est arrivé hier.
• Right: Marie est arrivée hier.
• Why: With être, the participle normally matches the subject. Add -e for feminine singular Marie.

Making the participle agree with an avoir subject

• Wrong: Elles ont finies le projet.
• Right: Elles ont fini le projet.
• Why: With avoir, there is no agreement with the subject. The advanced preceding-object rule does not apply because le projet follows the participle.

Putting pas after the participle

• Wrong: Je n'ai compris pas.
• Right: Je n'ai pas compris.
• Why: In the passé composé, ne ... pas wraps around the conjugated auxiliary.

Translating the English present perfect mechanically

• Misleading: J'ai habité ici depuis trois ans for “I have lived here for three years” when you still live there.
• Better: J'habite ici depuis trois ans.
• Why: French commonly uses the present tense with depuis for a situation that began in the past and is still continuing. The passé composé tends to present the situation as completed.

Usage Notes

In conversation, the passé composé is the normal way to narrate completed events. The literary passé simple often fills a similar narrative role in novels and historical writing, but it is uncommon in ordinary speech. A sentence such as Il entra dans la pièce may become Il est entré dans la pièce in conversation.

The tense often appears with a finished time expression: hier (yesterday), la semaine dernière (last week), à huit heures (at eight), or soudain (suddenly). A time expression is not required: J'ai perdu mes clés is complete by itself.

English speakers should pay special attention to the contrast with the present perfect. French allows J'ai vu ce film hier, whereas standard English requires “I saw this film yesterday,” not “I have seen this film yesterday.” Conversely, ongoing situations with depuis often use the French present, as shown above.

Beyond the Basics / Advanced Use

You do not need to master all of these rules at A2, but you will meet them in careful writing and later study.

Passé composé versus imparfait

The passé composé presents an event or change as bounded and completed. The imparfait often gives background, an ongoing situation, a repeated habit, or a description:

• Il pleuvait quand je suis sorti. — It was raining when I went out.
• Quand j'étais enfant, je jouais dehors tous les jours. — When I was a child, I played outside every day.
• Soudain, le téléphone a sonné. — Suddenly, the phone rang.

This is not simply “short action versus long action.” The speaker's viewpoint matters: J'ai travaillé pendant dix heures is a long action, but it is presented as a completed whole.

Agreement with a preceding direct object

With avoir, the participle agrees with a direct object when that object comes before the participle:

• Les lettres que j'ai écrites — the letters that I wrote
• Je les ai écrites. — I wrote them.
• Quelle robe as-tu choisie ? — Which dress did you choose?

There is no agreement when the object follows: J'ai écrit les lettres. There is also no agreement with an indirect object (a recipient or other object introduced conceptually by “to”): Les personnes à qui j'ai parlé (“the people I spoke to”).

The pronoun en normally does not trigger agreement in standard usage: Des pommes ? J'en ai acheté. (“Apples? I bought some.”)

Finer points with reflexive verbs

Reflexive constructions use être, but participle agreement follows the role of the reflexive pronoun. In Elles se sont vues, se is a direct object, so vues agrees. In Elles se sont parlé, parler à quelqu'un makes se indirect, so there is no agreement. Similarly:

• Elle s'est lavée. — She washed herself.
• Elle s'est lavé les mains. — She washed her hands.

In the second sentence, les mains is the direct object and follows the participle, while se is indirect; therefore lavé does not agree. These distinctions matter most in writing because many agreement endings are silent.

Verbs whose meaning changes with the auxiliary pattern

For verbs such as sortir, monter, descendre, rentrer, retourner, and passer, the construction matters. Used without a direct object to describe the subject's movement, they commonly take être. Used transitively—when the subject acts on a direct object—they take avoir:

• Elle est descendue au sous-sol. — She went down to the basement.
• Elle a descendu les cartons. — She carried the boxes down.
• Nous sommes passés par Lyon. — We went through Lyon.
• Nous avons passé deux jours à Lyon. — We spent two days in Lyon.

Practice Tips

1. Build sentences in two steps. For each new verb, first recall its participle, then add the correct auxiliary: prendre → pris → j'ai pris; venir → venu → elle est venue.
2. Tell a five-event story. Describe yesterday using connectors such as d'abord, ensuite, puis, and enfin. Check each verb for auxiliary choice and any être agreement.
3. Color-code what you hear or read. Mark avoir constructions in one color and être constructions in another. Circle feminine and plural agreement endings, even when they are silent.

Related Concepts

• Prerequisite: Avoir (to have) — supplies the auxiliary used by most verbs.
• Next step: Irregular Past Participles — expands the set of participles you can use confidently.
• Next step: Passé Composé with Être — focuses on auxiliary choice and subject agreement.
• Contrast: Imperfect Tense — provides background, descriptions, and habitual past actions.
• Later development: Pluperfect Tense — places an event before another past event.
• Later development: Passive Voice — also uses être plus a participle, but serves a different purpose.
• Later development: Past Infinitive — expresses an action completed before the main verb.
• Literary comparison: Passé Simple — the completed-event tense common in formal literary narrative.