Histoire et manuels — History and Textbooks

A tense you will only ever read

The passé simple is the clearest case in French of a form that is worth real effort in one direction and none at all in the other, and being explicit about that saves a learner a great deal of wasted work. **You will meet it constantly in print.** Every novel written in a conventional narrative register uses it. Every history textbook uses it. Children's books use it — 'il était une fois' is the imperfect, but what follows is usually the passé simple. Newspapers use it in longer features and obituaries. If you intend to read French books at all, not recognising 'il vint' or 'ils prirent' will stop you on the first page, and the irregulars are precisely the common verbs. **You will never need to produce it.** It has been absent from ordinary spoken French for a century or more, outside a few regional pockets and some formal oratory. A learner using it in conversation sounds like a character in a nineteenth-century novel, which is not a register available to anybody. Even in writing, a letter, an email or an essay uses the passé composé; the passé simple belongs to narrative prose, and writing it well is a stylistic skill rather than a grammatical one. **So the study strategy is unusual and worth stating.** Learn the third person singular and plural of the twenty or so commonest irregular verbs, as a recognition set. Do not conjugate paradigms. Do not practise producing sentences. Instead, read something — a short story, a chapter of a novel, the history textbook in this lesson — and let the forms accumulate in context, which is how native readers acquire them too. The forms are distinctive enough that context does most of the work: 'il prit' can only be one thing. One small observation about this lesson's framing. Ousmane's answer in line 9 — that the chapter says Faidherbe founded the city, 'pas comment, ni pour qui' — is doing something the grammar point cannot. A tense that seals events off in an observed past is a convenient tense for a sentence that does not want to be asked follow-up questions. That is not a criticism of the passé simple, which is simply the conventional tense for narrative. But it is worth noticing that 'Faidherbe fonda Dakar' is a complete sentence in a way that 'Faidherbe a fondé Dakar, et voici comment' is not — and the next lesson is about the questions the first version leaves out.