Le Causatif avec Faire

The causative faire is one of the most characteristic constructions in French. With a single verb (faire) plus an infinitive, French expresses what English needs three different patterns to handle: "have someone do something," "make someone do something," and "get something done." Je fais réparer ma voiture — "I'm having my car repaired." Il a fait pleurer l'enfant — "He made the child cry." Elle fait construire une maison — "She's having a house built." Once you internalize this construction, you stop reaching for clunky paraphrases and start producing the sleek, native French that natives produce automatically.

This page is the main reference on causative faire — its construction, its agent-marking rules, its rigid pronoun ordering, and its invariable past participle. The companion page on laisser and permettre covers the related but distinct permissive constructions.

What the causative does

The causative faire lets the speaker describe a situation in which they (or someone) arrange, order, or cause an action that someone else performs. The grammatical subject is the cause-er — the one who makes the action happen. The action itself is named by the infinitive. The actual performer (the causee) is mentioned (or pronominalized) according to a fairly rigid set of rules.

The construction maps to several English equivalents, depending on the volition and the agency of the parties:

• Have someone do (arrange for): I'll have my secretary call you. → Je vous ferai appeler par ma secrétaire.
• Make someone do (force, induce): He made me cry. → Il m'a fait pleurer.
• Get something done (passive-like): I'm getting the car repaired. → Je fais réparer la voiture.
• Send for, call for: They sent for the doctor. → Ils ont fait venir le médecin.

French covers all four meanings with the same syntactic frame.

The basic shape

Subject + faire + infinitive (+ object/agent)

The infinitive sits immediately after faire. This is a hard rule: nothing — no object, no agent, no adverb — can intervene between faire and the infinitive in the causative construction.

In the first sentence, je is the cause-er, réparer is the action, ma voiture is the thing affected, and the agent (the actual repairer) is implicit (or, here, named in a chez-phrase). In the second, the cause-er arranges; in the third, the cause-er induces an emotional reaction; in the fourth, the imperative faites + infinitive is the standard way to ask someone to produce a result.

One participant: just an agent

When the embedded action involves only one participant — the agent who performs it, with no separate thing acted upon — the agent simply follows faire + infinitive. The agent here functions like a direct object of the faire-infinitive complex.

When the agent is pronominalized in this single-participant pattern, it takes a direct-object pronoun: je le fais venir, il nous fait rire, elle les fait travailler.

Two participants: agent + thing affected

When the infinitive's action involves both an agent (the causee) and a thing affected (a direct object), the structure shifts. The thing affected stays close to the infinitive, and the agent gets marked with à or par.

Subject + faire + infinitive + thing-affected + à/par + agent

In these sentences, the thing affected (ma voiture, un livre, un essai, une maison) sits right after the infinitive; the agent (le mécanicien, son fils, ses élèves, un architecte) follows, marked with à or par.

à vs par: which to use?

Both prepositions are grammatical, but they carry different connotations.

• à is the default for everyday or interpersonal arrangements where the causee is an expected participant. Faire lire un livre à son fils, faire écrire un essai à ses élèves, faire chanter une chanson à un enfant. The relationship is regular, often domestic or pedagogical.
• par suggests agency or professional capacity — the causee is doing the action through their own competence, often as a job. Faire réparer la voiture par le mécanicien, faire construire la maison par un architecte, faire taper la lettre par sa secrétaire. The relationship is more formal or task-oriented.

In practice, par also wins out when à would create ambiguity. The phrase faire envoyer une lettre à Marie could mean either "have someone send a letter to Marie" (Marie is the recipient) or "have Marie send a letter" (Marie is the agent). To unambiguously mark Marie as the agent, French uses par: faire envoyer une lettre par Marie.

When ambiguity matters, par is your disambiguator.

Pronouns: clitic before faire

The most distinctive syntactic feature of the causative is the position of the pronouns. When any participant — the thing affected or the agent — is pronominalized, the pronoun sits before faire, not before the infinitive. This violates the usual rule that pronouns sit immediately before their governing verb (the infinitive); in the causative, the entire faire-infinitive complex acts as a single unit, and pronouns attach to its left edge.

The position is fixed regardless of tense.

Two pronouns: thing affected + agent

When both the thing affected and the agent are pronominalized — the most demanding case — both clitics sit before faire, in the standard French clitic order. The thing affected takes a direct-object pronoun (le, la, les); the agent takes an indirect-object pronoun (lui, leur) — even if the underlying noun was marked with par. Once an agent appears as a clitic, it adopts the indirect-object form regardless of which preposition introduced it.

This double-clitic pattern (le lui, le leur, la lui) is one of the harder drills in B1 French. It rewards repetition. Try producing the conversion exercise: J'ai fait réparer la voiture par Pierre → Je la lui ai fait réparer. Elle fait lire le livre à son fils → Elle le lui fait lire.

Past participle of faire: invariable

Here is the grammatical surprise that violates one of French's strictest rules: in the causative, the past participle fait is invariable. It does not agree with a preceding direct object, even when the direct object is feminine or plural and the standard past-participle agreement rule would normally demand agreement.

In causative faire + infinitive, the past participle fait is always invariable.

This invariability was officially recommended by the 1990 spelling reform, but it had been the preferred usage long before. The reasoning: in the causative, faire functions as a kind of light auxiliary, and the embedded infinitive is the verb that really governs the direct object. Treating faire as a fully agreeing main verb in this construction would obscure the syntactic structure — there would be two layers competing for agreement (faire and the infinitive).

The same invariability applies regardless of person, gender, and number of the preceding direct object.

Reflexive causative: se faire + infinitive

When the cause-er arranges for an action to be performed on themselves, French uses the reflexive causative se faire + infinitive. This is the standard way to say "to get something done to oneself."

The construction se faire + infinitive is the standard French equivalent of English "to get + past participle," especially with negative or accidental events: se faire arrêter (to get arrested), se faire renvoyer (to get fired), se faire avoir (to get conned), se faire engueuler (to get yelled at). It is one of the highest-frequency causative patterns in everyday speech.

A note on past-participle agreement in se faire: as with the basic causative, fait remains invariable in se faire + infinitive constructions. Elle s'est fait opérer, not elle s'est faite opérer. This is the modern recommendation; older texts may show agreement (especially in nineteenth-century literature).

Useful causative collocations

Some faire + infinitive pairs are so common they function almost as single verbs. Memorize them as fixed units.

These collocations are the backbone of conversational French. Je te ferai savoir, fais-moi rire, ne me fais pas attendre, tu m'as fait peur, ça me fait mal — sentences you will say or hear daily.

Comparison with English

English speakers learning the causative encounter three friction points.

1. One verb does the work of three English patterns

English has have someone do, make someone do, and get something done as three distinct constructions. French collapses them all into faire + infinitive. The cost: French has lost the fine distinctions English keeps in the verb (have implies polite arrangement, make implies coercion, get implies arranging by various means). Context recovers the meaning.

2. The pronoun position is unfamiliar

In English, "I'll have him do it" places the pronoun him directly between have and do. The French equivalent — Je le ferai faire — sticks the clitic on the left edge of faire. The shape feels alien at first.

3. The invariable past participle is a special rule

The French past-participle agreement rule normally says: with avoir, agree with a preceding direct object. The causative fait is the most prominent exception. This is one of the few places where French grammarians actively recommend you not apply the agreement rule, even when its conditions seem to be met. Learn the exception once and stop second-guessing it.

Common Mistakes

Key takeaways

• Causative faire
  • infinitive
  lets the subject of faire arrange or cause the action named by the infinitive. It covers English "have someone do," "make someone do," and "get something done."
• The infinitive sits immediately after faire. Nothing can intervene.
• One participant (just the agent): faire + infinitive + agent (je fais venir Pierre).
• Two participants (agent + thing affected): faire + infinitive + thing + à/par + agent (je fais réparer la voiture par Pierre).
• à is the default for everyday/interpersonal causatives; par is preferred for professional agency or to disambiguate when the verb already has an indirect object.
• Object pronouns sit before faire, not before the infinitive: je le fais venir, je le lui fais réparer.
• The past participle fait in the causative is invariable, even with a preceding feminine or plural direct object: la voiture que j'ai fait réparer.
• Reflexive se faire
  • infinitive is the standard form for getting something done to oneself: se faire couper les cheveux, se faire opérer, se faire voler. The past participle is also invariable here.
• High-frequency collocations (faire savoir, faire venir, faire pleurer, faire attendre, faire taire) are the backbone of conversational French.
• For the related permissive constructions, see laisser and permettre.