This paper discusses the distribution of indicative and subjunctive in French embedded clauses. We show that standard semantic criteria, such as factivity and veridicality, cannot account for the subjunctive/indicative alternations. We propose to reexamine the facts in the light of an "emotive" versus "cognitive" division. We then question the role of the complementizer in the selection process. Using syntactic criteria such as wh-extraction, we come to the conclusion that the complementizer que comes in different flavours and that its various feature compositions might play a role in mood distribution