I’m coming back to my last column from last season, at the request of Jean-Marc, who wrote to me on Facebook following this Bonbon sur la langue of June 30, 2024.
He said to me: “Hello Muriel, you just said ‘in three minutes, I’m on vacation’. Yves Calvi always says: ‘In five minutes, Laurent Gerra is with us’. It seems to me that the use of the future tense would be more correct.”
And he ends very kindly with “I wish you a good holiday”… which shows that he doesn’t hold it against you too much! Especially since he’s wrong, yes! Indeed, the expression of the future is a completely accepted value of the present indicative – even if it may seem paradoxical, I agree.
Let’s see what her website says about it, my dear. Language Help Desk. “It is possible to use the present tense to talk about a future event. It can be a fact located in the near future [c’était le cas dans mon exemple : ‘dans 3 minutes, je suis en vacances’] or of a future fact perceived as being inevitable, unavoidable and to which we want to give more force and weight. The future action evoked by the present can also be hypothetical. This is the case in particular of the present tense used in a subordinate clause with a conditional if, the consequence of which is expressed in the main clause with a verb in the future or present tense.”
These verbs speak of the more or less distant future.
Oh my… what big words, we need examples. They are coming! When we say “Wait for me, I’ll be back!” I’m coming back, it’s definitely in the present tense. If we say “Wait for me, I’ll be back”, using the future tense, we see a much more distant future, like “I’m going to travel around the world, wait for me, I’ll be back!”
If I say “Stéphane is arriving next week”, I also use the present tense, whereas “next week” is indeed the future. The Language Help Desk still gives the examples “Next summer, I am making the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela; One more remark and I am leaving; If you are free Saturday evening, we invite you to dinner.”
All these verbs speak of a more or less distant future… and yet, they are in the present tense! There you go. QED. Ah, and dear Jean-Marc, I am probably going to shut you up in another corner, if I may, but the present tense can express not only the future, but also the past! And you use it every day, like all French people!
If you say “I just got back from vacation”, you may have come back two days ago, but since it is the recent past… you use the present tense: I am coming back. There is also what is called the historical present tense; if I say “In 1682, Louis XIV settled in Versailles”, here the present tense makes the story more vivid, more recent than if I said “he settled in”.
Similarly, we speak of the present tense of narration, and it is used for the same reason. “We were sitting at the breakfast table. Suddenly, someone rings, I get up, I open the door, it’s the postman.” See “They ring, I get up, I open, it’s”: all that is present tense. And yet I have just used it to tell a past story. French is really surprising, isn’t it? And it’s not over yet! Because the future tense can also express… the past! Yes, let’s take our historical example again. If I say “In 1682, Louis XIV moved to Versailles.”
I can continue with “He will remain there until his death, on September 1, 1715, at 8:15 in the morning.” This “will remain” is historical future. A future to evoke, since it is September 1, 2024, an event that occurred exactly 309 years ago!
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