Email Professionnel

A French business email is a piece of writing with a stable architecture: a subject line, an opening, an opening sentence stating purpose, the substance, a sentence offering further availability, and a fixed closing salutation followed by a name. Each of these parts has expected vocabulary and grammar. Mastering them is one of the higher-leverage skills at B2: a single careless email can damage a professional relationship in ways that no oral conversation could. This page reads a complete sample email and explains the grammar choices behind every move.

The example below is one a French candidate would actually write — formal, polite, but not stiff. Once you can read it line by line and predict what each next line is doing, you can write your own.

The email

Objet : Demande d'information

Bonjour Madame Dupont,

Je vous contacte au sujet de votre offre publiée le 15 mai. J'aimerais obtenir des informations supplémentaires concernant le poste de chef de projet.

Pourriez-vous m'indiquer si la formation linguistique est requise et quel sera le pourcentage de télétravail ?

Je reste à votre disposition pour toute information complémentaire.

Cordialement,

Jean Lefèvre

Eight short paragraphs. About 60 words. Yet the message is unmistakably French and unmistakably professional. Almost every clause illustrates a point of formal register grammar.

Objet — the subject line

The first line, Objet : Demande d'information, is the email's subject line. Objet (literally "object", in the sense of "subject matter") is the standard French label, equivalent to "Subject" in English. A formal email always has an Objet, and it is short, nominal, and informative — never a sentence.

Notice that the colon in Objet : is preceded by a non-breaking space. This is the French typographic rule: a colon, semicolon, question mark, or exclamation mark is preceded by a space. English typography puts these tight against the word; French separates them. Email clients and word processors handle this automatically with French language settings, but a learner writing on an English keyboard has to remember it.

The phrase demande d'information uses the elision d' before the vowel-initial information. In French, de elides before any word starting with a vowel or a mute h. Demande de rendez-vous keeps the full de; demande d'aide elides; demande d'horaire elides because h is mute. This is automatic for natives, mechanical for learners.

Bonjour Madame Dupont — the opening

The choice of opening is one of the most analyzed decisions in French business correspondence. The example uses Bonjour Madame Dupont — formal but humanized.

Bonjour Madame Dupont sits in the middle: respectful enough for a first contact, friendly enough to feel human. Madame, Monsieur is reserved for when you do not know the recipient's gender or are writing to an institution. Cher + name presupposes a relationship; using it in a first email feels presumptuous.

Madame, Monsieur, Mademoiselle are capitalized when used as standalone forms of address. They are abbreviated Mme, M., Mlle when followed by a surname in running text.

Je vous contacte — the opening sentence

The first sentence of the body, Je vous contacte au sujet de votre offre publiée le 15 mai, is the genre-defining opener. It does three things: it identifies the writer's act (je vous contacte), it specifies what about (au sujet de), and it anchors the message in time (publiée le 15 mai).

Je vous contacte uses present tense — what we sometimes call the "performative present", where saying the verb is doing the action. French uses this freely: je vous écris (I write to you), je vous remercie (I thank you), je vous prie (I beg you). English does the same in I write, I thank you. The conditional je vous contacterais would be too tentative for an opener; the future je vous contacterai would be wrong because the act is already happening as you write.

Au sujet de is the canonical phrase for "regarding" in formal French. Alternatives: concernant (a participle used as a preposition), à propos de (slightly more conversational), relativement à (very formal, almost legal). A B2 learner should keep two or three of these in active rotation.

The participle phrase publiée le 15 mai is a reduced relative clause: votre offre [qui a été] publiée le 15 mai. The past participle agrees in gender and number with offre (feminine, singular), giving publiée. This kind of participle compression is a hallmark of formal French — it lets you embed time and circumstance without spelling out a full clause.

J'aimerais — conditional politeness

J'aimerais obtenir des informations supplémentaires — "I would like to obtain additional information". The verb aimerais is the conditionnel présent of aimer. Why conditional? Because French uses the conditional as a politeness marker on requests and statements of desire. The indicative je veux (I want) sounds blunt to the point of rude in formal writing. Je voudrais (I would like) and j'aimerais (I would like) soften it.

The two are largely interchangeable, but je voudrais is slightly more direct ("I'd like"), while j'aimerais is slightly more affective ("I would love to / be glad to"). In a business email, both are appropriate.

This conditional of politeness is one of the most reliable moves in French formal writing. Whenever you want to ask, request, or express a desire, route it through the conditional and you will sound appropriate.

Pourriez-vous + future after si

The next sentence, Pourriez-vous m'indiquer si la formation linguistique est requise et quel sera le pourcentage de télétravail ?, packs in two B2 grammar points.

First, pourriez-vous — second-person plural conditional of pouvoir. Pouvez-vous is grammatical but blunt; pourriez-vous is the polite default for any request you cannot frame as a yes/no. The inversion (pourriez-vous m'indiquer) is itself a register marker — formal French uses inversion in questions where casual French would use est-ce que.

Second, the conjunction si introduces an indirect yes/no question (si la formation linguistique est requise). After si in this indirect-question sense, French uses the indicative — present, future, past, whatever the meaning requires. Est requise (present) describes a current state.

But notice the next clause: quel sera le pourcentage de télétravail. Here the embedded question is introduced by quel (an interrogative determiner), not si, and uses the future sera. Why? Because the percentage is something that will hold once the candidate is hired — it has not yet been settled. French freely uses the future in indirect questions when the answer concerns a future state. English would also use future ("what will the percentage be") in this case.

A common confusion arises because of the other si — the conditional si meaning "if" in hypothetical sentences. That si never takes a future or conditional in the same clause: si tu viens, je serai content (if you come, I'll be happy). But the si of indirect questions is a different beast and follows the rules of normal indicative sentences.

Je reste à votre disposition — the standard pre-closing

Je reste à votre disposition pour toute information complémentaire is one of those phrases every French professional knows by heart. It signals that you are available for follow-up and politely closes the substantive part of the email. Variants:

The structure à votre disposition is invariable; the personal verb (je reste, je me tiens, je suis) can vary slightly. Toute information complémentaire uses the indefinite toute (any) plus a feminine singular noun — note the agreement. Tout, toute, tous, toutes in this "any" sense is followed by a singular noun in formal French and means "any whatsoever".

Cordialement — the closing

The closing salutation is the final calibration point. Cordialement is the modern professional default — neutral formal, neither stiff nor casual. The full landscape:

The full formula Veuillez agréer, Madame, l'expression de mes salutations distinguées is a complete sentence with the verb agréer in the imperative veuillez (formal "please"), the addressee inserted as a vocative, and the noun phrase l'expression de mes salutations distinguées as the direct object. This is letter-grade formality and reserved for printed correspondence with banks, lawyers, public administrations, or VIPs. In ordinary business email, it would feel anachronistic.

Common mistakes

In formal email, requests almost always go through the conditional. Je veux in writing to someone you do not know reads as demanding, almost rude. The conditional j'aimerais or je voudrais is the politeness norm.

The state of "is training required" is current; use present est requise. The conditional pourriez-vous on the verb of asking softens the request. Reserve future for genuinely future-referring embedded questions: quel sera le salaire.

Cher is appropriate once a working relationship exists. For a first contact, Bonjour + civility + surname or the more formal Madame, Monsieur is safer.

The closing salutation is followed by a comma, a line break, and the writer's full name. In a first email, give your full name; once a relationship is established, the first name alone is acceptable.

Bonjour combines with the civility on the same line. Splitting it onto its own line is non-standard and reads as a learner error.

Key takeaways