Passé composé

Passé composé (French pronunciation: ​[paˈse kɔ̃poˈze], compound past) is the most commonly used past tense in the modern French language. It is used to express an action that has been finished completely or incompletely at the time of speech, or at some (possibly unknown) time in the past. The passé composé originally corresponded in function to the English present perfect, but is now used mainly as the equivalent of the simple past.

Passé composé is formed using an auxiliary verb and the past participle of a verb.

The passé composé is formed by the auxiliary verb, usually the avoir auxiliary, followed by the past participle. The construction is parallel to that of the present perfect (there is no difference in French between perfect and non-perfect forms).

The passé composé is usually translated into English as a simple past tense, "I saw", or as a present perfect, "I have seen". It could also be translated as emphatic past tense, "I did see".

The auxiliary may actually be used similarly in any tense, leading to the French compound tenses.

The auxiliary verb is typically avoir ‘to have’, but is sometimes être ‘to be’ (see below).

This is the conjugation of avoir, with a past participle:

The verbs that use être as an auxiliary verb are intransitive verbs that usually indicate motion or change of state.

Since some of these verbs can be used as a transitive verb as well, they will instead take avoir as an auxiliary in those instances; e.g.

This is the conjugation of être, with a past participle:

The following is a list of verbs that use être (for intransitive usage) as their auxiliary verbs in passé composé:

The above are commonly remembered using the acronym DR and MRS VANDERTRAMP. In addition to these, at least one other verb is conjugated with être:

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