French Cursive

Characteristics

Origin	France
Era	20th century
Region	France
Slant	slight right
Loops	fully looped
Lead-in strokes	yes
Joins	fully joined and uniform
Taught today	French primary schools on Seyès ruled paper

Rendered in Playwrite FR Trad, the closest available approximation; instructional labels are generic descriptors, not curriculum brands.

French cursive is the fully looped, fully joined school hand taught in French primary schools, written on Seyès ruled paper and recognisable by its uniform letters and ornate capitals.

Letterforms

Every ascender and descender is a loop, the letters lean slightly to the right, and the lowercase forms are uniform in height and width, which gives a page of French handwriting its even texture. Several letters differ from the American forms: the lowercase r has a distinctive pointed shape, the z loops below the line, and the capitals are large, rounded and often ornate, drawn from the old round hand. The whole alphabet is taught from the first year of primary school.

Joins and lifts

Every lowercase letter joins the next, and the hand is written with as few lifts as possible: dots and crossbars after the word, the pen off the paper only between words and before capitals. The bridge after o, v, w and b works as in every joined model.

Seyès paper

French exercise books are ruled with the Seyès grid: horizontal lines 8 millimetres apart with three fainter lines between them at 2-millimetre intervals, and vertical lines every 8 millimetres. Lowercase letters sit in the first 2-millimetre band, ascenders reach the third line and capitals the third or fourth. The ruling fixes the proportions of the hand, which is why French handwriting is so consistent from one writer to the next.

Where it comes from

The French school cursive was standardised in the twentieth century from the round hand taught in the nineteenth, keeping the loops and the ornate capitals that American models discarded. It remains the single national model, taught in every primary school, which is unusual among Western countries.

Practising it

Rule paper with the Seyès grid, or print the closest ruling from the blank paper pack, and practise the loops until they close at the same height every time. The worksheet generator renders the model in a French school face, and the looped cursive page describes the wider family.

Frequently asked questions

Why does French handwriting look so uniform?

Because every child learns the same national model on the same Seyès ruled paper, whose 2-millimetre bands fix the height of every part of every letter. American and British schools use several models and looser rulings, so their handwriting varies more from person to person.

Which French letters confuse English readers?

The pointed lowercase r, which looks like a small v or an i to English eyes; the looped z; the lowercase q with its tail curled to the right; and the ornate capitals, especially the looped G, S and T. Numbers differ too: the French 1 has a long upstroke and the 7 is crossed.

Is French cursive taught to adults?

Rarely as such, but the model is easy to adopt: anyone who writes a looped cursive can add the French capitals and the r. Learners of French as a second language mostly meet it when reading handwritten notes and forms, and the alphabet is learned in an afternoon.