The present study is an investigation into the use of the vicarous verb faire in comparative clauses and its development during the period of modern French. (1600-). It is based on a corpus consisting of some 300 literary texts, 80% of which represent our own century and the rest the previous three centuries.

The investigation does not support the common view of a constant decline in the use of vicarious faire from the 18th century onwards: the construction is in fact nearly as frequent today as it was in classical French. It is shown that the reason for this is purely grammatical: the faire-construction has a "syntactic identity" of its own, quite distinct from that of the two other constructions found in comparative clauses, namely repetition or implication of the verb of the head clause. Thus, the "pro-verb" faire is not, as is often said, a simple means of stylistic variation, but a syntactic phenomenon of great generality, as indispensable to language in the verbal sphere as are the "pro-nouns" in the nominal sphere.

The study further deals with two more specific questions: the introduction of the neuter pronoun le before faire and the replacement of the direct construction, now obsolete, by an indirect, prepositional one (with de, pour, avec or à) in the case where faire is followed by a direct object. Both uses can be dated back to the 17th century and it is argued that their generalization in our century has primarily syntactic reasons, though stylistic considerations clearly influence the choice of construction, thus giving rise to a great deal of individual variation.