François-Paul Journe x Prince of Monaco - Finally a Normal Chronograph?

François-Paul Journe and Prince Albert II of Monaco unveiled a unique watch at the Yacht Club de Monaco this week, a chronograph built for the Prince's environmental foundation and going to auction with Phillips in Singapore on 25 November. Everything it makes goes to the foundation, which turns twenty this year.

Buried in the announcement is a detail that will interest collectors more than the charity angle. This is the first conventional chronograph Journe has ever built.

Source: fpa2.org

A Career Spent Avoiding the Obvious

Journe has made chronographs before. He has made a split-seconds. He has made a flyback. He built the Centigraphe, which measures intervals down to a hundredth of a second using a display of three subdials that most people need explaining twice.

 

What he had never done was the normal one. A central sweep hand, a thirty-minute counter, a tachymeter scale around the edge, the layout that every Swiss brand has been producing since the 1930s.

 

That gap says something about how the man works. Journe made his first tourbillon as a young watchmaker in his uncle's restoration workshop in Paris, spending years on it, and every dial he has produced since carries the words Invenit et Fecit, Latin for invented it and made it. His most famous watch, the Chronomètre à Résonance, runs two separate balance wheels close enough together that they fall into step with one another through vibration alone, an effect first described in the seventeenth century and almost never successfully used in a wristwatch. His movements are made from solid 18 karat rose gold instead of brass, which serves no mechanical purpose and looks extraordinary through a caseback.

 

A watchmaker with that record building a standard chronograph is roughly as surprising as a chef with three Michelin stars putting a hamburger on the menu. The interest lies entirely in how he does it.

Source: fpa2.org

This Has Happened Before

There is a precedent worth knowing about, because it suggests where this watch might lead.

The Centigraphe began as a favour. Jean Todt, then running Ferrari's racing team, asked Journe for a watch to auction in aid of a brain and spinal research institute in Paris. Journe designed a chronograph that could measure to a hundredth of a second without wrecking the movement's running, the watch sold, and the design went on to become one of the pillars of his catalogue.

 

So a one-off Journe made for charity has form. Anyone bidding in Singapore will be aware that they might be buying the prototype of something.

The Writing on the Dial

The dial is burgundy lacquer, and the numerals are drawn from oracle bone script, which is the oldest known form of Chinese writing.

 

The name is literal. Around three thousand years ago, during the Shang dynasty, diviners would carve questions into ox shoulder blades and turtle shells, apply heat until the bone cracked, and read the pattern of cracks as the answer. What will the harvest be. Should we go to war. Will the king recover. The questions and sometimes the outcomes were then inscribed on the same bone, which is why a system for talking to the dead has given historians their earliest reliable record of Chinese administration.

 

The bones themselves were lost for millennia and then rediscovered by accident in 1899, when a scholar in Beijing noticed that the dragon bones being ground up and sold as medicine in a pharmacy had writing on them.

Putting numerals from that script on a chronograph, an instrument built to measure the near future in seconds, is a good joke and a better piece of design. The rest of the dial supports it without shouting: a tachymeter scale in whitened silver, grey sapphire counters with titanium surrounds, a large date window at six in sandblasted white gold, and hands in matt rhodium, ivory and red lacquer.

The Watch

The case is 42mm and two-tone, which Journe does not often do. The caseband, crown and pushers are 18 karat 6N gold, the warm reddish alloy, set against platinum elsewhere, and the back is engraved Fondation Albert II - 2026.

 

The layout puts the running seconds at nine, the thirty-minute counter at three, the large date at six, and the chronograph hand through the centre. Four displays, cleanly separated, with no crowding anywhere. Journe has spent his career making dials that look calm while hiding difficult mechanics underneath, and this is the same trick applied to a complication where he has nothing to prove.

What Happens in November

Journe has supported the foundation since 2018. The foundation itself was set up by Prince Albert in 2006 and works on climate, biodiversity, fresh water and desertification, concentrated in the Mediterranean, the polar regions and the poorest countries.

 

Predicting the result is a mug's game, and there are two things pushing in the same direction. Journe's market has been on a long climb, with his early subscription pieces now trading into seven figures and unique examples treated as trophies whenever they appear. Charity rooms also behave differently from commercial ones, since nobody in the bidding wants to be the one who let a good cause down, and results regularly land somewhere unconnected to the estimate.

 

It is a busy autumn for this sort of thing, with Phillips also handling a set of unique Rolex Daytonas for charity in London in September. The Journe is the smaller story and the more interesting watch, because a brand that makes fewer than a thousand watches a year has just shown a design nobody expected from it, and then made exactly one.

Source: fpa2.org