Passé composé

The passé composé (pronounced [pase kɔ̃poze]; 'compound past') is a past tense in the modern French language. It is used to express an action that has been finished completely or incompletely at the time of speech, or at some (possibly unknown) time in the past. It originally corresponded in function to the English present perfect, but now there is a tendency to use it for all completed actions in the past as the equivalent of the simple past. Its current usage corresponds fairly closely to that of the Latin perfect tense. It is formed using an auxiliary verb and the past participle of a verb.

In British teaching of French, the passé composé is usually known as the perfect tense.