L'Accord du Participe Passé avec Être

When a French verb takes être as its auxiliary, the past participle behaves like an adjective: it agrees in gender and number with the subject. Marie est partie spells partie with a final -e because Marie is feminine singular; les filles sont parties adds -es because les filles is feminine plural. This is the simplest agreement rule in French past-tense grammar — far simpler than the avoir rule — and once you internalise it, you can apply it without thinking to every maison-d'être verb and every pronominal verb.

This page covers the four forms of the participle, the masculine-as-default rule for mixed-gender groups, the special case of on, and the question of when agreement is silent versus audible. The audible cases matter because they are the ones a listener actually hears — most être-agreement is invisible in speech but visible in writing, and learners who only listen sometimes miss that the rule even exists.

The four forms of the past participle

Every past participle that can take être-agreement has four written forms, exactly like an adjective:

The pattern is identical to adjective agreement. If you can write un homme grand → une femme grande → des hommes grands → des femmes grandes, you already know how to add the right ending to a past participle.

Mixed-gender plural: masculine wins

When the subject is a coordinated group with both masculine and feminine members, the participle goes to masculine plural. This is the same rule that governs adjective agreement in coordinated noun phrases: a single masculine member tips the agreement to masculine, even if the feminine members vastly outnumber it.

This rule has been politically contested in modern French — there are reform proposals to use a règle de proximité (agreement with the nearest noun) or to write inclusive forms with both endings — but in standard contemporary French, the masculine-default rule still holds. If you are writing for a class, an exam, or any neutral context, use the masculine plural for mixed groups.

All-feminine plural: keep the feminine plural

If every member of the group is feminine, the participle takes the feminine plural form. Don't accidentally default to masculine just because there are several people — the rule is "all-feminine → feminine plural; otherwise masculine plural."

The default plural: masculine

When the gender of the subject is unknown, generic, or the speaker doesn't want to specify, masculine plural is the default. Les enfants sont sortis uses sortis (m.pl.) even if the children include girls — enfants is grammatically masculine, and the participle follows the grammatical gender of the noun, not the biological gender of the referents.

The same rule explains why les gens (the people) takes masculine agreement — gens is masculine in modern French, even though the people involved are presumably mixed:

The on-puzzle: grammatical 3sg, semantic anything

The pronoun on is grammatically third-person singular — verbs after on always conjugate as for il/elle: on parle, on est arrivé. But semantically, on in conversational French almost always means "we" (replacing nous), and it can refer to a group of any gender composition.

In informal modern French, the participle agreement after être with on follows the semantic referent, not the grammatical 3sg. So a group of women saying "we arrived" will write on est arrivées (f.pl.), and a group of men will write on est arrivés (m.pl.).

In strict, prescriptive writing, you can also leave on as masculine singular (on est arrivé), treating it as the formal indefinite "one." But this sounds stiff in conversation and is rare today. The semantic agreement is the dominant convention in modern French.

With reflexive verbs: same rule, with a wrinkle

All pronominal (reflexive) verbs take être, and the agreement rule still applies — but with one important nuance. The participle of a pronominal verb agrees with the reflexive pronoun, not directly with the subject. In most cases, the reflexive pronoun is the direct object of the verb (it refers to the subject performing the action on themselves), so the result is the same as agreeing with the subject:

But when the reflexive pronoun is an indirect object — as it is with verbs of communication (se parler, se sourire, se téléphoner) or whenever the verb already has a separate direct object — there is no agreement, even though the auxiliary is être:

This subtlety is treated in detail on the pronominal-verb agreement page; we mention it here only so you know that pronominal agreement is almost the same rule as plain être-agreement, but with this one exception.

Pronunciation: when does agreement actually sound different?

Here is a fact that surprises many learners: most être-agreement is silent. The added -e, -s, and -es are all written but not pronounced. Allé, allée, allés, allées all sound exactly the same — /ale/. Parti, partie, partis, parties all sound /paʁ.ti/. Venu, venue, venus, venues all sound /və.ny/.

This is why French learners can often coast through speech without making a single agreement decision — the listener has no way of knowing what you wrote. But agreement is obligatory in writing and graded ruthlessly in dictations and academic essays.

There is one set of participles where agreement is audible: those ending in a consonant. The masculine form ends in a silent consonant; the feminine form, by adding -e, makes that consonant pronounced. The most common such participles do not appear with être (they are all avoir-verbs: pris/prise, mis/mise, fait/faite, écrit/écrite), but a few être-verbs do show audible agreement:

So il est mort and elle est morte sound different (/mɔʁ/ vs /mɔʁt/), and a French speaker hears the difference instantly. Il est né and elle est née sound identical.

For most maison-d'être verbs, the bottom line is: write the agreement carefully, but don't expect a French listener to hear it.

Comparison with English

English has no equivalent of this agreement rule. The participle gone, arrived, left never changes form: Marie has left, Marc has left, the boys have left, the girls have left — all the same. This is part of the broader fact that English has almost no agreement morphology in its verb system at all.

The closest English speakers come to agreement morphology is in the third-person singular present (she walks vs. they walk), and even that is just a single suffix. The four-form participle paradigm of French is genuinely new territory, and it is the first place A1–A2 learners run into the principle that "what you write" and "what you say" can differ significantly. The être-agreement rule is the gentle introduction; the avoir-with-preceding-direct-object rule is the harder cousin (see agreement with avoir).

The other point of friction is the gender-of-the-subject question. English speakers come from a language where I is gender-neutral, you is gender-neutral, we and they are gender-neutral. So when a French sentence forces the writer to decide between je suis allé and je suis allée, they have to ask "wait — am I a man or a woman in this sentence?" The answer is whatever matches the actual referent. A woman writes je suis allée; a man writes je suis allé. There is no neutral form in standard French.

Drill: agree the participle with each subject

Take the verb partir and apply it to a range of subjects. Notice that the auxiliary (est, sont, suis, etc.) doesn't change form by gender — only the participle does.

Notice the vous row in particular. Vous can be a single formal "you" (singular) or a plural "you," and gender can be either. Four possible agreements: vous êtes parti / partie / partis / parties. This is one of the few situations in French where the verb form encodes information that English-speaker grammar cannot reach: you left in English is one form for all four meanings, but in written French each of the four sounds different in a courtroom record.

Common Mistakes

Mistake 1: Forgetting agreement entirely.

Mistake 2: Defaulting to masculine for an all-feminine plural.

Mistake 3: Defaulting to feminine for a mixed-gender group.

Mistake 4: Agreeing with the auxiliary instead of the participle.

Mistake 5: Using être-agreement after avoir.

Mistake 6: Treating on as masculine singular when it clearly means "we" (a group of women).

Key takeaways

With être as auxiliary, the past participle agrees with the subject in gender and number — exactly like an adjective. Add -e for feminine singular, -s for masculine plural, -es for feminine plural, and leave the base form for masculine singular. Mixed-gender plurals default to masculine. The pronoun on takes semantic agreement when it means "we." With reflexive verbs, the same rule almost always works, with the one exception of indirect-reflexive cases.

The agreement is mostly silent in speech but obligatory in writing. The audible cases — mort/morte, pris/prise (with avoir), écrit/écrite (with avoir) — are the ones a French listener actually hears, but for the bread-and-butter maison-d'être verbs (allé, parti, venu, arrivé, sorti, monté, descendu), the rule lives entirely on the page.