S’en aller — to leave / go away | French Verb Chart

🇬🇧 S’en aller: aller in a trench coat

S’en aller — to go away, to be off — is simply aller wearing two pronouns, and every form is the aller chart plus the reflexive and the en: je m’en vais, tu t’en vas, il s’en va, nous nous en allons, ils s’en vont. The famous forms are the announcement — « bon, je m’en vais » (right, I’m off — the standard leaving-a-party sentence, softer than je pars) — and the imperative of banishment: va-t’en ! (go away!), vas-y’s angry cousin, plural allez-vous-en ! The compound past stacks its pronouns dutifully — je m’en suis allé(e) — though daily French usually swerves to je suis parti at exactly that moment, one pronoun being plenty in the past.

Register is the whole game: partir states a departure; s’en aller performs one — more personal, slightly wistful, the verb of songs (half of French chanson is someone s’en va-ing) and of gentle exits: « elle s’en va » says she’s leaving in a way « elle part » doesn’t quite. Grammar corners worth a glance: the subjunctive is the gorgeous que je m’en aille — « il faut que je m’en aille » (I must be off) is the polite goodbye of a thousand French dinner parties and at least one famous song — and the futur proche produces the comedy of aller conjugating itself: « je vais m’en aller » (I’m going to go away), perfectly correct, faintly ridiculous, entirely French. The en never translates — it’s the old “from here” fossilised into the verb — and that untranslatability is the lesson: French pronominal verbs sometimes carry mood, not meaning. Drill the three exits as a set: je pars (fact), je m’en vais (performance), j’y vais (casual — “I’m off”, aller with y instead) — three ways to leave a room, ranked by drama, all conjugating the same aller you already know.