The article discusses the system of the future tenses in French and Bulgarian. Diachronically it is modality that dominates in the semantic of these tenses while in the contemporary state it is exactly the opposite – it is the temporal characteristics that dominate on the systematic level. This structure of the system of the future forms both in French and Bulgarian is entirely specific and unique. The basic difference is that the French forms have a very rich semantic content, which includes both temporal and modal meanings ; the Bulgarian ones are semantically differentiated, they are more specialized in denoting one or the other type of meaning, which explains their relatively higher number in comparison to the French ones.