French/Lessons/Historical France

Unlike in English, there is a literary past tense in French, used when writing formally. This past tense is the. It is relatively simple to predict when to use this tense: for every occurrence of the in conversational French, one simply uses the  in literary French. Note that the is not a composed tense, and therefore does not have an auxiliary verb.

Formation
To conjugate in this tense, find the stem and appends the appropriate ending.

Regular stems
The following verbs are irregular in the present indicative, but are regular in their stems.