Passé simple: nearly dead on screen, alive in books

The passé simple is almost never used in spoken French. In 318 million words of French film and television dialogue, eut ("he had", passé simple) is said about 10 times per million words, while eu, the participle of il a eu ("he had", passé composé), is said 749 times: 76 to 1. For vint against venu ("came") it is 81 to 1, and for trouva against trouvé ("found") 176 to 1. Speech tells the past with the passé composé and the imparfait. The passé simple lives on in books, history and stories, including stories for young children. A learner needs to recognise it, and almost never to say it.

Updated 11 October 2026 · 7 min read

How often is the passé simple used in spoken French?

For each verb below, the first column is the passé simple "he/she" form, and the second is the past participle that the passé composé is built from (il a trouvé, elle est venue). Both are counted as single words in the same list.

The ratios are rough, because a participle also turns up outside the passé composé: in the pluperfect (il avait trouvé), in the passive, and as an adjective (je suis pris, "I'm busy"). But no reasonable correction closes a gap of fifty or a hundred to one. On screen, the passé composé has won.

The verb "to be" gives the same answer. Fut ("was") is said 66 times per million, the commonest passé simple form we counted, but était ("was", imparfait) is said 3,098 times, 47 for every fut. Furent ("were") is 11 per million against 264 for étaient.

Which forms can be counted, and which can't

A word list only sees spellings, and several passé simple forms are spelt like something else:

• Dit ("said") is also the present (il dit, "he says") and the participle (il a dit). It is one of the commonest words in French, and none of that tells us anything about the passé simple.
• Vit ("saw") is also the present of vivre: il vit à Paris, "he lives in Paris".
• Fit ("did, made") differs from the imperfect subjunctive fît only by an accent that subtitles can leave off.
• Put ("could") is also an English word, and English turns up in subtitles.
• The -a forms of many -er verbs are real words in Italian or Spanish too: parla, entra, arriva. Only French-only spellings (demanda, trouva, commença, décida) went in the table.

The forms that are left are unambiguous, so the counts above measure the passé simple and nothing else.

Who still says it: "he" and "they", hardly "we"

The passé simple is a tense for telling a story about someone else. Its "he/she" and "they" forms are the only ones with any real presence:

Nous fûmes is said about once in every two and a half million words. That fits what grammars say: the "we" and "you" plural forms are rarely used today, even in writing. They exist mostly in conjugation tables.

Even the 66 per million for fut need not come from conversation. Subtitles include voice-over narration, historical dramas and stories read aloud, and those are exactly the places the passé simple survives. The word list can't say which line a word came from.

Where the passé simple still lives

Written stories. Novels and history books use the passé simple for the events of a story. It is the standard narrative tense of formal writing.

Children's books and fairy tales. French children meet it early, because it is in books for very young readers. Charles Perrault's Le petit Chaperon rouge (Little Red Riding Hood) shows the division of labour clearly. The famous opening is in the imparfait, because it sets the scene:

Then, as soon as something happens, the passé simple takes over: Le petit Chaperon rouge partit aussitôt ("set off at once") … elle rencontra compère le Loup, qui eut bien envie de la manger ("she met the Wolf, who very much wanted to eat her") … Il lui demanda où elle allait ("He asked her where she was going"). Partit, rencontra, eut and demanda are the events; allait, in the imparfait, is the background. That is how the two tenses share a written story, and the passé composé does the passé simple's job when the same story is told aloud.

Formal speeches. Grammars note it can still be heard in very formal speech.

As a joke. French speakers sometimes use it in conversation on purpose, to sound pompous or over-refined.

In Canada, where it is still used somewhat more than in France.

How much of the rest of written French differs from spoken French is a theme of how many words you need for French, which gives the passé simple a single line. The same split exists in Italian, whose passato remoto is the subject of a paragraph in Italian or French. French also lost a second literary form the same way: the imperfect subjunctive, now even rarer in dialogue than the passé simple, is in is the subjunctive really rare?.

Do French learners need the passé simple?

To read, yes. To speak, no. You will not need it in conversation, and using it there would sound like a joke. But the first French novel, history book or children's story you open will be full of it, and the irregular forms are hard to guess if you have never seen them.

Learn to recognise the endings. Regular -er verbs end in -a and -èrent (il demanda, ils demandèrent). Most -ir and -re verbs end in -it and -irent (il répondit, ils répondirent). Some irregular verbs end in -ut and -urent (il voulut, il fut, ils furent).

Learn the irregular ones by sight. Fut (was), eut (had), fit (did), prit (took), vint (came), devint (became), naquit (was born), mourut (died). Naquit and mourut are worth knowing for any history book: il naquit en…, il mourut en….

Spend your speaking time on the passé composé. It is what everyone uses, and it is also where French's two helper verbs (avoir and être) and the agreement of participles come in. The most common French verbs shows which verbs you will be putting into it most, and is French hard to learn? covers what else takes the time.

Verbavia (our own course) teaches French in frequency order, with the grammar explained in English, and the passé simple is taught in hand-written lessons as the tense of written stories, alongside reading, listening and writing sections. The French course is free on the web in any browser, including on a phone. You can browse the most common French words or take the two-minute French vocabulary test.

Caveats

• Word forms, counted as written. Each form is counted once, whatever it is doing, and accents are as the subtitlers typed them.
• Subtitles are not all conversation. They include narration and translated films, so the passé simple counts are, if anything, higher than in everyday talk.
• Participles do more than one job, so the ratios in the first table overstate the gap a little, and should be read as "dozens to one", not as exact figures.

Sources

• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018 (fr), content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. The corpus size is computed by scripts/frequency_curves.py and printed from its output rather than typed; the per-million rates and ratios are our own count of the same fr list: a form's rate is its count divided by the total of all counts in the list, and each ratio is one form's count divided by the other's.
• Wikipedia: Passé simple: used in formal writing, including history and literature, and formal speech, mostly for narration; present in books for very young French children; "practically disappeared" from spoken French, replaced by the passé composé; used occasionally as a joke "to make the sentence sound either more pretentious or refined"; first and second person plural "rarely if ever used in contemporary French, even in writing"; used more in Canada; the conjugations of être, avoir, faire and venir.
• Wikipedia: French verbs: the passé simple as "a literary tense that is rarely used in spoken language", the present perfect used in its place "except in literature or very formal speeches"; the imperfect subjunctive found only in older and more literary works.
• Wiktionary: vit (passé simple of voir and present of vivre), naquit and mourut (passé simple of naître and mourir).
• Charles Perrault, Le petit Chaperon rouge, in Les Contes de Perrault (Casterman, 1902 edition), on Wikisource: fr.wikisource.org/Le_petit_Chaperon_rouge).