You will never speak this tense, but you must recognize it to read Le Petit Prince or Les Misérables.
This tense replaces the Passé Composé in formal writing. It usually ends in -a, -it, or -ut.
"Il parla" = "Il a parlé" (He spoke)
"Elle finit" = "Elle a fini" (She finished)
"Il fut" = "Il a été" (He was)
A parent reading a story to a child.
Il était une fois, un chevalier qui arriva (arriver) devant un château.
(Once upon a time, a knight arrived in front of a castle.)Et qu'est-ce qu'il a fait ?
(And what did he do?)Il vit (voir) un dragon et sortit (sortir) son épée.
(He saw a dragon and took out his sword.)The Passé Simple is a "ghost" tense. It is dead in spoken French (nobody uses it in conversation), but it haunts French literature. It gives a sense of formal distance and "legendary" status to events. That is why it is used in fairy tales, novels, and history books. It makes the events feel timeless.
Find and click the 3 verbs in the Passé Simple in this excerpt.
En 1789, le peuple est en colère. Le Roi décida de convoquer les États Généraux.
Napoléon naquit en Corse. Il devint Empereur en 1804.
Aujourd'hui, nous étudions son histoire.
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