This article deals with progressive periphrasis ‹être après INF› et ‹être en train de INF›. The first one was in use by the French speakers of Europe during the time of colonial extension in the 17th century. We are interested here in the values expressed by these expressions, a few decades apart. The comparison focuses on their use in the early 1970s and in the current era. Beyond a reversal of their frequency of use during this period, the studied periphrasis has been and still are conceptually similar. They are not in complementary distribution, from a semantic point of view, contrary to what has been argued elsewhere. It is proposed that the low frequency of the “progressivity” category in French would have facilitated the gradual decline of ‹être après INF› (in accordance with normative prescriptions for more than a hundred years), in favor of ‹être en train de INF›, which has gradually become the most common form.