Passive simple,when used without auxiliary

Question

I am doing B1 French and reading Camus La Peste( hard going sometimes) On page 173 he says"elles suffirent" which I take to mean they were enough,and I struggled with the conjugation but I found it as passive simple on the Lawless website. I interrogated Gemini AI and it suggested that passive simple is a compound tense requiring auxiliary from etre...despite its name. It also suggested Camus often used passe simple in a stylistic for without the auxiliary. So,is the Lawless conjugation right,and is elles suffirent passe simple, and please,what is going on?

Accepted Answer

John, 
Laura is correct - the passé simple as a ' simple tense/mood ' is by definition ' simple ', not compound. Others include the present tense, imparfait etc 
Only ' compound tenses/moods ' include an auxiliary verb.
https://progress.lawlessfrench.com/revision/glossary/verb-types/verbes-auxiliaires
 
https://www.lawlessfrench.com/grammar/verb-tense/ 
When I asked Google AI ' was passé simple ever a compound tense ', it answered as expected :
" AI Overview
No, the French passé simple was never a compound tense, but it is a literary equivalent of the passé composé, which is a compound tense: "

Answer

Many thanks Maarten,that makes a great deal of sense now.

Answer

Hi John,
Just to add to Maarten's excellent answer you might want to discover what compound tenses are on our lesson -
Temps composé
Please also note that it is 'passé' (past) simple,  as 'passive' means a totally different thing in grammar.

Answer

Thanks Cécile. It's a strange thing but in England ,for GCSE (A1/A2) the passé simple is not really used,and I think it's called the passé historique. Pretty well all the time they use imperfect, passé composé or pluperfect and I can recognise these for past actions but I am really surprised that nobody talks about passé simple for past actions which are completed.Very rarely in books have I seen what I now know is the passé simple, so many thanks for your answer.

Answer

Hi John,
You might be interested in reading my answer to a question about the relevance of the past historic tense nowadays -
https://french.kwiziq.com/questions/view/is-passe-simple-used-often-in-today-s-times
Bonne Continuation !