piétiner

From piéter +‎ -iner.

• IPA^(key): /pje.ti.ne/

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piétiner

1. (intransitive) to stomp (make loud sounds by stepping)
2. (intransitive) to shuffle (move forwards with short steps and with difficulty)
3. (intransitive, figuratively) to make no headway, to go into a dead end
4. (transitive) to trample (underfoot)
   • 1857, Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary […]‎^[1], Paris: Michel Lévy Frères; republished as Eleanor Marx, transl., Madame Bovary, 1886:

     Ce qui résumait son opinion; car les plaisirs, comme des écoliers dans la cour d'un collège, avaient tellement piétiné sur son cœur, que rien de vert n'y poussait, et ce qui passait par là, plus étourdi que les enfants, n'y laissait pas même, comme eux, son nom gravé sur la muraille.

     Which summed up his opinion; for pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there, and that which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave a name carved upon the wall.

• piétinement

• “piétiner”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012