Almost Doing Something: "faillir"
In English, we usually use the adverb "almost" to describe an action that came close to happening. In French, you express this using a specific verb: faillir.
| to almost (do) | faillir |
To talk about a near miss, conjugate faillir in the passé composé (using the auxiliary avoir + the past participle failli) and follow it immediately with an infinitive.
| The developer almost formatted the computer. | Le développeur a failli formater l'ordinateur. |
| My colleague almost deleted the file. | Mon collègue a failli effacer le fichier. |
| We almost lost the data. | Nous avons failli perdre les données. |
Reflexive Verbs and Pronouns
When the action that "almost" happened involves a direct object pronoun or is a reflexive verb (like s'évanouir, to faint), the pronoun goes immediately before the infinitive, not before faillir.
| As for the hard drive, he almost deleted it irreversibly. | Quant au disque dur, il a failli le supprimer irréversiblement. |
| During the hard drive failure, I almost fainted ! | Pendant la panne du disque dur, j'ai failli m'évanouir ! |
Reacting to Near Misses
When you narrowly avoid disaster, you might feel a sudden rush of soulagement (relief) or realize what you should have done. You can use the past conditional of devoir (to have to) or pouvoir (to be able to) to express what should have or could have happened:
- aurais dû
- infinitive = should have
- aurais pu
- infinitive = could have
| What a relief, you could have paralyzed everything ! | Quel soulagement, tu aurais pu tout paralyser ! |
| You should have restarted the computer before the outage ! | Tu aurais dû redémarrer l'ordinateur avant la panne ! |