What this is
English uses in and to for every place on earth. In France, to France, in Paris, to Paris — one word covers direction, another covers location, and nothing else matters.
French does it the other way round. Direction and location share a single preposition, and what changes instead is the place: whether it is a city or a country, and if a country, whether it is masculine, feminine, or plural. Get the place’s category right and the sentence writes itself.
The rule
Going to or being in:
| Place | Preposition | Example |
|---|---|---|
| any city | à | à Paris, à Dakar, à Rome |
| feminine country | en | en France, en Espagne, en Italie |
| masculine country | au | au Canada, au Japon, au Portugal |
| plural country | aux | aux États-Unis, aux Pays-Bas |
| country starting with a vowel | en | en Iran, en Israël |
Coming from:
| Place | Preposition | Example |
|---|---|---|
| any city | de | de Paris, d’Amsterdam |
| feminine country | de | de France, d’Espagne |
| masculine country | du | du Canada, du Japon |
| plural country | des | des États-Unis, des Pays-Bas |
Notice what the second table is: it is last concept’s contraction table, applied to country names. Du Canada is de + le Canada. Des États-Unis is de + les États-Unis. Nothing new is happening — you are just seeing that countries carry articles underneath.
Why it works this way
Every country in French has a definite article: la France, le Canada, les États-Unis. You do not usually see it, because en hides it and because English translations throw it away. But it is there, and it is what all four prepositions are reacting to.
En is the odd one out. It is the one preposition in this set that absorbs the article rather than combining with it. En la France is not a thing. This is old: en descends from Latin in, and it fused with the following article so long ago that the article disappeared entirely rather than leaving a contraction behind.
Cities are simple because most of them genuinely have no article. Paris is just Paris. So à has nothing to collide with, and de has nothing to contract with.
And the gender rule — a country ending in -e is feminine — is not a coincidence either. Latin’s feminine nouns overwhelmingly ended in -a, which came into French as a final -e. France, Espagne, Italie, Allemagne, Chine, Belgique, Suisse, Russie: all feminine, all ending the same way, all for the same historical reason.
Edge cases
Cities carry no article; countries always do
This is the single most useful thing in the concept. À Paris and de Paris are the complete story for a city — no article to think about, no gender to look up, no contraction to perform.
Countries are the opposite. The article is always there, doing work you cannot see until you go to say from. That is why en France and au Canada look like unrelated constructions while meaning exactly the same kind of thing.
A handful of cities do carry an article — Le Caire, La Nouvelle-Orléans, Le Havre — and they behave like masculine countries: au Caire, du Havre. They are rare enough to learn one at a time.
en swallows the article
La France exists. En la France does not. Neither does dans la France as a way of saying you are in the country. Once you choose en, the article is gone, and any attempt to put it back produces something no French speaker says.
This also means en gives you no information about gender. En Espagne and en Iran look identical, and one is feminine while the other is masculine. You only discover the gender when you need de: d’Espagne versus d’Iran.
The -e rule and le Mexique
Trust the rule. A country name ending in -e is feminine well over ninety percent of the time, and the exceptions are few enough to name: le Mexique, le Cambodge, le Zimbabwe, le Mozambique. Of those, Mexique is the one you will actually need, which is why every French course teaches it as au Mexique in the same breath as the rule itself.
The vowel rule outranks the gender rule. L’Iran and Israël are masculine and would predict au, but a vowel at the front forces en — for the same reason à le became au: French will not tolerate the clash.
What English speakers get wrong here
Reaching for à with countries. Je vais à France is the commonest error in this entire module, because à works for every city and English uses one word for both. Countries need the en/au/aux set, always.
Using dans. Dans la France is grammatical French, but it means something odd — inside France, as opposed to outside its borders. It is not how you say you live there. Save dans for rooms, boxes, and bags.
Forgetting that from changes everything. Learners who have drilled en France often produce je viens en France when they mean they’re from there. Going in and coming out use different prepositions: en France / de France, au Japon / du Japon.
Treating aux États-Unis as an irregular lump. It is not irregular at all. The country is plural, so its article is les, so à + les gives aux and de + les gives des. Once you see the article, the forms are predictable.