Passé Composé with Être: Movement & Reflexive Verbs

Bonjour!

Introduction

In our last lessons, we explored the passé composé, focusing on how it's formed with the auxiliary verb avoir and a past participle. You learned to form regular past participles and recognize several key irregular ones like eu, été, fait, and vu.

Today, we'll shift our focus to the other auxiliary verb: être. While most verbs use avoir, a specific and important group uses être to form the passé composé. This lesson will teach you how to form the passé composé with être for two categories of verbs: verbs of movement and reflexive verbs.

The most significant new concept we'll cover is that when être is the auxiliary, the past participle must agree with the subject. This is a fundamental rule in French grammar, and we'll approach it by observing patterns in examples.

1. The "House of Être": Verbs of Movement

A small group of verbs, mostly describing movement or a change of state, uses être as their auxiliary. A common way to remember them is with a visual metaphor, often called the "House of Être" or "Dr. & Mrs. Vandertramp."

Let's start with a visual representation of these verbs.

Now, let's see these verbs in action. The following video provides a clear list of these verbs and their past participles.

The verbs you just saw include:

• aller (to go)
• venir (to come)
• arriver (to arrive)
• partir (to leave)
• entrer (to enter)
• sortir (to go out)
• monter (to go up)
• descendre (to go down)
• naître (to be born)
• mourir (to die)
• rester (to stay)
• tomber (to fall)
• ... and their derivatives like revenir (to come back) and devenir (to become).

2. The Golden Rule: Past Participle Agreement

Here is the most important difference between using avoir and être: When a verb is conjugated with être in the passé composé, its past participle must agree in gender and number with the subject.

This means the ending of the past participle changes:

• Add -e for a feminine subject.
• Add -s for a plural subject.
• Add -es for a feminine plural subject.

Let's see how this works. The next segment of the video provides excellent, clear examples of this rule.

Let's summarize the pattern you saw with the verb aller (to go):

• Masculine singular: Il est **allé** au marché. (He went to the market.)
• Feminine singular: Elle est **allée** au marché. (She went to the market.)
• Masculine plural: Ils sont **allés** au marché. (They went to the market.)
• Feminine plural: Elles sont **allées** au marché. (They went to the market.)

Notice that while the spelling changes, the pronunciation often does not (e.g., allé, allée, allés, allées all sound the same). The agreement is primarily a written rule, but it is essential for correct grammar.

3. The Second Category: Reflexive Verbs

The second group of verbs that always uses être is much simpler to identify: all reflexive verbs. You might remember these verbs from an earlier lesson; they are verbs where the subject performs the action on itself, and they use a reflexive pronoun (me, te, se, etc.).

The structure is: Subject + Reflexive Pronoun + être (conjugated) + Past Participle.

And importantly, the rule of agreement also applies here. The past participle agrees with the subject.

This image provides a complete picture of the pattern for the verb se laver (to wash oneself) in the passé composé.

Look at the patterns in the table:

• Je me suis **lavé**. (I washed myself - if the speaker is male)
• Je me suis **lavée**. (I washed myself - if the speaker is female)
• Elle s'est **levée** à 8h. (She got up at 8am.)
• Nous nous sommes **promenés**. (We went for a walk - if 'nous' is masculine or a mixed group.)

Conclusion

This lesson introduced a crucial new dimension to the passé composé. You have learned to identify the two main categories of verbs that conjugate with être and have been introduced to the fundamental rule of past participle agreement.

Key Takeaways:

• The passé composé can be formed with être as the auxiliary verb, in addition to avoir.
• Two types of verbs use être: a group of movement/state-change verbs (like aller, partir, venir) and all reflexive verbs (like se lever, se laver).
• When using être, the past participle must agree in gender and number with the subject of the verb (by adding -e, -s, or -es).

The concept of agreement is very important and can take some time to master. In our next lesson, we will focus entirely on applying these past participle agreement rules with être in various example sentences to help you solidify your understanding.