Language learning has a real snowball effect: the more bits you learn, the easier it is to put those bits together and produce vastly more, and more powerful, structures. The pluperfect tense offers a brilliant example. The very name of this tense probably conjures up images of dusty grammar books and theoretical learning. In fact it’s a very useful and well-used tense in French and English (to name but two!), and with the knowledge that we already have about the perfect and imperfect tenses we can reliably and easily construct any pluperfect, or as it is known in French, the “plus-que-parfait” (= the more than perfect).
Hang on, you may say: how can anything be more than perfect? Well, it can’t in the sense of quality, of course, but in terms of time it’s entirely logical. (In an earlier post I pointed out that the French word for a grammatical tense is le temps, a word which in other contexts translates precisely as “time”). Well, the pluperfect tense is the one which refers to things which we had done before something else happened, or which had been going on for some time.
- When we finally reached the summit we found that someone had been there before us.
- I had never understood the imperfect before I studied this [or: before studying this].
Here it’s useful to think again of that timeline I invited you to draw in the previous post. But now, instead of seeing ourselves on the right of the line, in the present, we focus on a past event somewhere to the left (in the first example above, reaching the summit), and then look back even further to a preceding event (someone else having been there).
Of course, by this stage you may well have decided that all this stuff about timelines is unnecessary, and that the parallel construction in English [had + past participle] is a dead give-away for the corresponding pluperfect in French. You’d be right.
Indeed, if you see the word “had” here as the imperfect of the English auxiliary “to have” you will appreciate that French uses precisely the same mechanism for creating the tense – that is, using the imperfect tense of the auxiliary verb. The only difference from English is that there is a choice of auxiliaries because thirteen verbs use “être” instead of “avoir”.
The imperfect tenses of these two auxiliary verbs, already covered elsewhere, produce the forms shown in the table below. In an earlier post I stressed the rule whereby the past participle of verbs using être for the perfect must agree with the subject of the verb. The examples in the second column here show that this rule applies also to the pluperfect – it’s only the tense of the auxiliary that has changed. So, in a word, to make the pluperfect it’s always the same process, using the imperfect tense of avoir or être with the past participle of the verb in question.
| Verbs with “avoir” | |
| J’avais acheté le pain | I had bought… |
| Tu avais mangé les gateaux | You had eaten… |
| Il avait contribué beaucoup de choses | He had contributed… |
| Nous avions compris la vérité | We had understood… |
| Vous aviez refusé tout d’abord | You had refused… |
| Ils avaient vendu leur maison | They had sold… |
| Verbs with “être” | |
| J’étais arrivée avec mon mari | I had arrived… |
| Tu étais parti avant moi | You had left… |
| Il était mort deux semaines auparavant | He had died… |
| Nous étions entrés dans la maison | We had gone into… |
| Vous étiez déjà sorti quand il est arrive | You had already left… |
| Ils étaient restés à la maison | They had stayed… |
The actual construction of the pluperfect, then, is very straightforward. If you can handle the perfect (passé composé) you can push any and every verb back in time (just like going from “have” to “had”) simply by changing the present tense of the auxiliary into the imperfect. Et voilà, vous avez le plus-que-parfait!
Just to wrap up this explanation I’d like to stress the fact that we are talking here about the construction [had + past participle]. The word “had” in itself has all sorts of other functions in English, and you need to be alert to the differences. Let me quote again from The Wasp Factory, which I used in the previous post to illustrate tenses.
“My father had arrived back at the house just as I returned from the beach, and I had gone to bed at once, so I had a good long sleep. In the morning I called Jamie, got his mother, and found out he had gone to the doctor’s but would be straight back.”
I’ve marked the obvious pluperfects in blue, but notice that the one appearing in pink is just a simple past – it doesn’t matter how long that sleep was, it is a discrete action with a clear end. It was later that the narrator called Jamie (simple past) and found that something else had happened earlier.
And, at risk of creating a spoiler for anyone yet to read the book, here’s another double use of “had”:
“I had decided I would try to murder Esmerelda before she and her parents even arrived for their holiday. … It would be risky… but I had to do something… I had to.”
Here the pluperfect in blue clearly precedes the arrival for holidays: no problem. I’m using this paragraph to show the difference between that form and the expression “to have to [do, etc]”. This is just one of many uses of the verb “to have”, and the stress on need is emphasised by the italics of the original text. This is nothing at all to do with the pluperfect tense, which will always be marked by the presence of a past participle.
Note: if you want to find out even more about how to deal with expressions based on “to have to [do…]”, you could look at this post on the subject of “devoir”.
French can't be difficult 