Giáo trình động từ tiếng Pháp - Part V Considering Your Mood: Subjunctive or Not - Chapter 21

Chapter 21

Forming and Using the Past Subjunctive

In This Chapter

Creating the past subjunctive

Using the past subjunctive

Choosing between the present and past subjunctive

In French you use the past subjunctive much more often than in English. It’s a compound

tense and is used to express a completed action in the past. The choice between the

present and past subjunctive depends on the time relationship between the main clause

and the subordinate clause.

You use the past subjunctive, also known as the perfect subjunctive, in oral as well as written

French. It follows the same rules as the present subjunctive that I talk about in Chapters 19

and 20. Use the past subjunctive when the action of the verb in the subordinate clause takes

place before the action of the main verb. That sounds tricky, but you can see an example of

this in this sentence: Je suis triste que mon ami ne soit pas venu à ma boom hier means

I am sad that my friend did not come to my party yesterday. In this chapter I first show you

how to form the past subjunctive and then how to correctly use it.

Forming the Past Subjunctive

Like all past tenses in French, the past subjunctive needs an auxiliary and a past participle

of a verb of your choice. Remember that French has two auxiliaries — avoir (to have) and

être (to be). To form the past subjunctive, you put these two auxiliaries in the present

subjunctive and add the past participle. For a list of verbs taking these auxiliaries as well as

a list of past participles, see Chapter 12.

The past subjunctive follows the same rules of agreement as any other compound past

tense. If the auxiliary of the verb is être, then the past participle agrees with the subject. If

the auxiliary of the verb is avoir, then the past participle agrees with the preceding direct

object if the sentence has one. If the sentence doesn’t have a preceding direct object, then

the past participle doesn’t change.

All pronominal verbs take the auxiliary être, but they follow the same rule of agreement as

those taking the auxiliary avoir. The past participle agrees with the preceding direct object

if the sentence has one. In the following examples, I conjugate an avoir verb (voir), an être

verb (partir), and a pronominal verb (se lever) in the past subjunctive tense.

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