enchaîner

To chain something up literally (enchaîner un chien), or — far more often in everyday speech — to link things together or move straight from one thing to the next without a pause: enchaîner les rendez-vous, enchaîner sur un autre sujet. Also used reflexively, s'enchaîner, for events following on from each other.

• Le prisonnier était enchaîné au mur. — The prisoner was chained to the wall.
• Elle enchaîne les interviews toute la journée. — She goes from one interview straight to the next all day.
• Les catastrophes se sont enchaînées cette année-là. — Disasters followed one after another that year.

Learners often only know the literal 'chain up' sense and miss the much more frequent figurative one (linking activities, moving on without a break) — in context, 'enchaîner sur' almost always means 'to move on to,' not anything about literal chains.

Often confused with enchainer.

• quote "Pour enchaîner les peuples, on commence par les endormir" — A line from Jean-Paul Marat's 1774 political work Les Chaînes de l'esclavage ("The Chains of Slavery"), still widely cited today.