Discussions of absolute and relative tense often focus on the futur antérieur (FA), which has variously been descibed as a tense, aspect and mood. In order to assess its place in the French verbal system, an analysis of a written media-based corpus was carried out. This revealed that, although relatively rare, FA functions as a tense-aspect with some modal values in a range of publications and a variety of newspaper text types. Furthermore, its use as an epistemic modal and as an equivalent to passé composé (PC), as discussed in recent literature, appears to fulfil a significant function in journalistic writing.