What is the passé simple?

The passé simple is one of French’s lesser known tenses, since it has now mostly fallen out of fashion. One reason for its decline is the passé composé, with which French students will be more familiar. Both past tenses were inherited from Latin and originally had quite different meanings: whereas the passé composé would refer to events with an obvious relevance to the present, the passé simple was a more general and detached tense referring to events that had occurred more than 24 hours in the past. Nowadays, the passé composé fulfils the passé simple’s old functions and, in spoken French as well as the majority of written French, it is used unilaterally in descriptions of the past. The passé composé’s recent popularity is in part due to the simplicity of its conjugations. It has strict, easily applied rules as well as endings that remain consistent no matter the speaker (j’ai entendu, nous avons entendu). The passé simple, on the other hand, is very difficult to learn and therefore to employ. Structurally, it involves no auxiliaries (neither avoir nor être) but is conveyed in single inflections of the base verb. It is prone to oral confusion with the imperfect and other tenses (j’aimai / j’aimais) and has a great variety of irregular forms (je vins, je pus). It is still important for French students to recognise the passé simple, however. The tense is now translated in the same way as the passé composé (Xed, e.g. “I walked), yet retains its detached, objective tone. As such, it is still heavily used in journalistic, scientific, academic, and otherwise formal writing. It is also very common in old French texts and is found throughout French literature until at least the 1950s. You will doubtless come across such material as a French student, so do try and get to grips with this difficult tense!