Le Présent: Falloir and Pleuvoir (impersonal verbs)

Falloir ("to be necessary") and pleuvoir ("to rain") are impersonal verbs — they exist only in the third-person singular, and the il that precedes them is a grammatical placeholder, not a real pronoun. There is no "he" doing the raining or the needing. The il is a dummy subject required by the syntax of French, in the same way English requires it in "it is raining" or "it is necessary." A French speaker hearing il faut partir doesn't picture some person named Il — they hear "one must leave" / "we have to go."

This page covers the conjugation of both verbs (which are simple, because most cells in the paradigm don't exist), the constructions they take, and the family of weather verbs that follow the same logic. These are among the first verbs A1 learners encounter, because il faut is everywhere in everyday French and il pleut is the default sentence taught in any introduction to weather.

Falloir: the verb that exists only as il faut

Falloir never has a je, tu, nous, vous, or ils form. It only ever appears as il + form. The full impersonal paradigm:

There is no infinitive to memorize beyond knowing falloir is the dictionary form. You will essentially never use falloir anywhere except in the cells above.

Two constructions: il faut + infinitive vs il faut que + subjunctive

The split between these two patterns is one of the most consequential distinctions in French grammar, because it teaches you what the subjunctive is for.

Il faut + infinitive: general necessity

When the obligation is generic — applying to everyone, no one in particular, or implied "we" — French uses an infinitive directly:

The infinitive after il faut has no subject of its own. It floats — it's an obligation in the abstract.

Il faut que + subjunctive: specific person

When the obligation falls on a specific subject — I, you, he, we, they — French requires il faut que + that subject + the verb in the subjunctive:

The logic is precise: an obligation directed at a specific person is by definition not yet a fact — it is something that needs to come true. That hypothetical, not-yet-real status is exactly what the subjunctive marks. The infinitive can't carry person, so when person matters, French is forced into the que-clause and the subjunctive comes along with it.

Falloir with a dative pronoun: il me faut

A third construction looks unusual to English speakers: falloir takes a dative pronoun (me, te, lui, nous, vous, leur) to indicate who needs something, followed by a noun for what is needed:

The literal sense is "to me there is needed a coffee" — closer to Old French and Latin syntax than to anything modern English does directly. The dative pronoun (which is also the indirect-object pronoun) marks the experiencer; the noun marks what is needed.

This pattern is also the standard way to express "it took X amount of time": il m'a fallu deux heures = "it took me two hours."

In conversational French, learners often default to avoir besoin de ("to need") instead, which is fine and arguably more common today: j'ai besoin d'un café. But il me faut is everywhere in casual speech, particularly in shopping and food contexts, and you should recognize it instantly.

Pleuvoir: the verb that only rains

Pleuvoir is the verb of rain. Like falloir, it has only third-person-singular forms — there is no je pleus, no tu pleus. Rain is something that happens; no one performs it.

Note: the past participle plu is also the past participle of plaire ("to please"), but the two are distinguished by context — il a plu almost always means "it rained," and cette idée m'a plu means "I liked that idea."

The expression il pleut des cordes (literally "it's raining ropes") corresponds to English "it's raining cats and dogs" — heavy rain. A more recent variant is il pleut des hallebardes (halberds), which sounds more emphatic.

A literary quirk: pleuvoir with a metaphorical plural subject

In careful or literary French, pleuvoir can take a real plural subject when something rains down metaphorically — insults, blows, money — and in that case it is conjugated in the third-person plural:

This is rare in everyday French and clearly literary in register. For learners, the rule remains: weather pleuvoir is impersonal singular only.

The family of weather verbs

A small set of weather verbs share pleuvoir's impersonal logic. All take dummy il, none have personal forms:

Weather expressions with faire

Beyond the dedicated weather verbs, French uses faire in many weather expressions, again with dummy il:

Why French requires the dummy il

English allows weather sentences with no real subject only because we use the same dummy it: "It's raining." Try removing the it — "raining" alone — and you have a fragment, not a sentence. French does the same thing with il. Every finite verb in French needs a subject; if there is no logical subject, the language inserts il to fill the slot.

The same dummy-il logic governs other impersonal constructions:

• Il y a — "there is / there are"
• Il est tard — "it is late"
• Il s'agit de — "it concerns / it's about"
• Il vaut mieux — "it's better"
• Il semble que — "it seems that"

In each of these, il is grammatically necessary but semantically empty. Some Romance languages (notably Spanish and Portuguese) have lost the obligatory subject altogether and just say Llueve / Chove — no dummy. French is more conservative here, partly because most French verb endings have collapsed in pronunciation, so the subject pronoun has to carry the grammatical work that endings used to do.

For more on this distinction, see il impersonal vs personal.

Comparison with English

English splits the work that falloir does across several verbs:

• Il faut + inf. → "must / have to" (general)
• Il faut que
  • subjunctive → "have to" (specific person)
• Il me faut
  • noun → "I need"
• Il a fallu → "it took / one had to"

Conversely, English uses one all-purpose construction (it is raining) for weather, where French has many possibilities. French distinguishes a process verb (il pleut), an adjective construction (il fait chaud), and even a noun construction (il fait du vent — literally "it does wind"). Mapping these one-to-one with English is impossible; you have to learn them as a small set of formulas.

Common Mistakes

Mistake 1: Trying to give falloir or pleuvoir a real subject.

Mistake 2: Using an infinitive after il faut que (where the subjunctive is required).

Mistake 3: Translating il as "he" with these verbs.

Mistake 4: Conjugating weather verbs in the plural with a real subject.

(The literary plural les compliments pleuvent exists, but only in figurative contexts and elevated register.)

Mistake 5: Forgetting the indirect-object pronoun in il me faut.

(In informal speech il faut un café pour moi is comprehensible but stilted; j'ai besoin d'un café is also fine and very common.)

Mistake 6: Saying il fait pluie instead of il pleut.

The il fait + noun pattern is reserved for il fait du vent, du soleil, du brouillard — not for rain or snow, which have their own dedicated verbs.

Key takeaways

• Falloir and pleuvoir are impersonal verbs — they only exist in the third-person singular, with a dummy il that has no real referent.
• Falloir takes three constructions: il faut + infinitive (general), il faut que + subjunctive (specific person), and il me faut + noun (with dative pronoun, "I need").
• Pleuvoir heads a small family of weather verbs (neiger, grêler, geler, tonner, bruiner); other weather expressions use il fait + adj./noun.
• The il in these constructions is the same kind of placeholder as English it in "it's raining" — grammatically required, semantically empty.
• A literary plural pleuvoir exists for metaphorical raining (compliments, blows) but is rare in everyday French.