Auxiliary Verbs, auf französisch, part trois

Now that we’ve got a fairly good sense of the two main auxiliary verbs in French, avoir and être, let’s examine some of the more complicated stuff that inevitably comes along. Earlier posts on French auxiliaries are here and here.

The passive voice

As in English, the auxiliary used to form the passive voice is the form “to be”, which is être, colored dark red here as in an earlier post to distinguish it from both the regular verb être and the auxiliary être. In a way, it’s actually false to distinguish between the passive auxiliary être and the full verb être because both really behave the same way, including the question of requiring gender and number agreement of the adjective. The only reason, perhaps, to make this artificial distinction is to be clear that the passive auxiliary être takes as its adjective a past participle of the main verb.

That’s right: the structure of the passive voice is identical to the structure of the compound tenses using the non-modal auxiliary être. Talk about a recipe for confusion!

Except not really. Because the verbs we’ve seen so far that take être as their auxiliary are all intransitive verbs—they lack a direct object, and so there is simply no way they can form a passive at all. What this means is that it’s only really verbs taking avoir as their auxiliary that will form the passive with être.

And of course, once the passive is formed, it can form its own compound tenses. Since the conjugated verb in the passive voice is être, this means the auxiliary constructions will be formed with avoir + été + past participle (inflected).

So let’s take the sentence “I read a book” and look at every single possible verbal construction. This list will look slightly different from the list above because there I classified the verbs into seven groups based on the TAM in which the conjugated verb was conjugated. Here, though, I will be classifying them into the fourteen possibilities that we get by including the various compound tenses.

• présent de l’indicatif
• je lis le livre
• le livre est lu
• présent du subjonctif
• (que) je lise le livre
• (que) le livre soit lu
• passé composé
• j’ai lu le livre
• le livre a été lu
• passé du subjonctif
• (que) j’aie lu le livre
• (que) le livre ait été lu
• imparfait de l’indicatif
• je lisais le livre
• le livre était lu
• imparfait du subjonctif
• (que) je lusse le livre
• (que) le livre fût lu
• plus-que-parfait de l’indicatif
• j’avais lu le livre
• le livre avait été lu
• plus-que-parfait du subjonctif
• (que) j’eusse lu le livre
• (que) le livre eût été lu
• passé simple
• je lus le livre
• le livre fut lu
• passé antérieur
• j’eus lu le livre
• le livre eut été lu
• futur simple
• je lirai le livre
• le livre sera lu
• futur antérieur
• j’aurai lu le livre
• le livre aura été lu
• conditionnel
• je lirais le livre
• le livre serait lu
• passé première forme
• j’aurais lu le livre
• le livre aurait été lu

Quite lovely, really. And it’s worth noting, although only briefly, that if our sentence had been “I read poetry”, which would give us je lis la poèsie, then all the active forms would remain identical, while all the passive forms would remain identical except for the use of the feminine form of the past participle of the verb lire, which is lue. Poetry is feminine for the French, while a book of poems is masculine.

If we note that the passé première forme is nothing but the compound tense of the conditionnel, which in turn is rather like a conditional or subjunctive-ish (I use the word loosely) version of the futur simple, we can see that we can translate le livre aurait été lu almost word-for-word as “the book would have been read.” The only difference is that English must make use of a modal auxiliary and a non-modal auxiliary to convey what French can convey in a single (non-modal) auxiliary conjugated with the appropriate endings.

Reflexive and reciprocal verbs (les verbes pronominaux)

This gets a little more fun. Reflexive and reciprocal verbs, or the so-called pronominal verbs, are called so because they use the reflexive pronouns. English has lost this pronoun and must use constructions like “myself” or “herself” instead, but other languages preserve it. German, for instance, uses sich; French uses se; and Russian has себя. In all of these cases, the pronoun is used whenever the agent and the patient of the verb are either the same (i.e., reflexive) or doing the same action to each other (i.e., reciprocal). 

Now, of course, the three languages use their reflexive pronouns differently. French and German inflect the pronoun for person, as English does too, sort of. Witness I talk to myself and He talks to himself; in French, je me parle and il se parle; and in German, ich spreche mich and er spricht sich. Russian does not; and so these two would work out to be я себе говорю and он себе говорит. This is also the case in Hindi: मैं अपने आप से बात कर रहा हूँ and वह अपने आप से बात कर रहा है. It is worth noting, however, that in both French and German, it is only in the third person that the reflexive pronoun is distinct from the direct and the indirect pronouns—sich versus ihn or ihm, in the case of German, se versus le/la or lui.

Another interesting difference comes into play with the use of grammatical cases. Russian, as a language that makes heavy use of cases, declines себя in the appropriate case in every context: себя in the accusative and genitive, себе in the dative and prepositional, and собой in the instrumental. This parallels the declension of the (non-reflexive) first- and second-person pronouns меня and тебя. German, which also uses cases fairly extensively, declines the first and second person pronouns for case (thus mich and mir, dich and dir), but not the reflexive pronoun itself (sich is both accusative and dative). French, however, makes no distinction among the direct (i.e., accusative), indirect (i.e., dative), and reflexive pronouns in the first person and second person in the singular and in the plural: me, te, nous, and vous serve all these purposes. Only in the third person is any distinction made:

• in the singular, we have:
• masculine (il): le, lui, and se
• feminine (elle): la, lui, and se
• in the plural, we have, for both masculine (ils) and feminine (elles): les, leur, and se

The point of all of this is to build up to some of the trickiness concealed by the use of the reflexive pronoun se in the French reflexive and reciprocal verbs.

The most common categories of reflexive and reciprocal verbs are:

• the so-called “inherently reflexive” verbs like se souvenir, meaning “to remember”, which just happen to take the reflexive
• reflexive verbs which are formed from non-reflexive verbs, such as se laver (“to wash [oneself]”) from laver (“to wash [someone else]”)
• reciprocal verbs, which are typically formed from non-reflexive verbs, and which are conjugated in the plural, such as se parler (“to speak [to each other]”).

In all of these cases, the auxiliary verb is always, without exception, être. Therefore, the default position is that the past participle must agree in gender and number with the subject of the verb. Thus, “I remember” is je me souviens (also the motto of Quebec!), while the passé composé of “she remembered” is elle s’est souvenue. And the passé composé of “I’ve washed (myself)” is je me suis lavé (since I’m male).


But—and there always seems to be one in French!—this past participle agreement falls apart in two further cases:

• when a perfectly well-formed reflexive verb is followed by a part of the body that is a direct object (so “she washed (herself)” is elle s’est lavée but “she washed her hands” is elle s’est lavé les mains)
• when the reflexive pronoun is not a direct object (so “we [all females] spoke among ourselves” is nous nous sommes parlé, because the structure of the verb parler demands the use of an indirect object with the preposition à, and so the se in se parler is really an indirect reflexive pronoun)

The strange rules of past participle agreement in French can be summarized thus:

• If the auxiliary verb, whether avoir or être, is preceded by a direct object (whether reflexive or not), then the past participle must agree with the direct object.
• If not, then:
• if the auxiliary verb is avoir or if it is être followed by a part of the body, there is no agreement. This is why the compound tenses of the passive voice do not show agreement between the subject and the past participle été.
• if the verb is être, the participle agrees with the subject of the verb. This is why the simple tenses of the passive voice do show agreement between the subject and the past participle of the underlying verb.

A few final examples to clear everything up:

• With avoir:
• “I [male] see the girl”: je vois la fille
• “I [male] have seen the girl”: j’ai vu la fille
• “I [male] see her”: je la vois
• “I [male] have seen her”: je l’ai vue
• “I [male] have read the books”: j’ai lu les livres
• “I [male] have read them”: je les ai lus
• “The books which I’ve read are interesting”: les livres, que j’ai lus, sont intéressants [the direct object of lire precedes it]
• With the passive voice:
• “The girl is seen”: la fille est vue
• “The girl has been seen”: la fille a été vue [note that été is masculine and vue is feminine]
• With être:
• Intransitive verbs:
• “The girl leaves”: la fille part
• “The girl (has) left”: la fille est partie
• “The boy leaves”: le garçon part
• “The boy has left”: le garçon est parti
• Reflexive verbs:
• “She washes (herself)”: elle se lave
• “She has washed (herself)”: elle s’est lavée
• “She washes her face”: elle se lave le visage
• “She has washed her face”: elle s’est lavé le visage

That should be it, I think, for now, at least on the topic of French auxiliary verbs. Mon dieu!