Pluperfect tense

The pluperfect tense is essentially the equivalent of English I had taken, he had arrived, they had wanted etc.

When is the pluperfect used?

The pluperfect in French is generally used in similar cases to where you would use I had eaten, they had arrived, etc. in English. (In English, these forms are sometimes called the past perfect.) In general, the pluperfect is used to refer to an extra "degree of pastness" compared to an ordinary past tense. For example, in the following sentence:

I had eaten when he arrived
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the pluperfect I had eaten refers to a point of time in the past, before a (later) time in the past when the action of he arrived occurred.

On the following pages, when we look at when to use the pluperfect tense in more detail, we'll see that things are slightly more complicated: the pluperfect can actually have a number of slightly different uses, and not all of these uses are identical in French vs English. But for now, we can think of the French pluperfect as being roughly equivalent to these cases in English where we'd use "had" plus a past participle (had taken, had arrived, etc).

How to form the pluperfect in French

Forming the pluperfect is fairly straightforward in French provided you know two things:

• how to form the perfect tense for the verb in question;
• how to form the imperfect tense of avoir and être.

So, taking these:

In other words, it uses the imperfect tense of the so-called auxiliary verb (usually avoir, but sometimes être). Here are some examples of some French verbs in the perfect vs pluperfect tenses:

Next...

On the next pages, we look at:

• when to use the pluperfect tense, taking a look at some details that we did not mention in our simple overview above;
• when not to use the pluperfect: in particular, there is a specific case where English where the pluperfect is used but where French uses other alternatives (in some rare cases, an unusual form called the passé surcomposé, which we look at later on).

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