WatchTime - August 2012

Journe’s company, based in Geneva, employs 65
watchmakers, micromechanics and other specialists.
The aperture in the dial of
the Sonnerie Souveraine
shows the hammer of the
striking mechanism.
Journe spent six years developing Caliber 1505, used in the
Sonnerie Souveraine.
He set up his first atelier in the mid-1980s in Paris. He went
on to construct highly complex one-of-a-kind timepieces commissioned
by connoisseurs. He built one timepiece each year until
1988, and each of them is unique.
He was then drawn to Switzerland. Together with partners,
he founded a firm in Sainte-Croix named THA (Techniques
Horlogères Appliquées). But the collaboration didn’t work out
the way Journe expected, and in 1989, he relocated to Geneva
and began building watches of his own.
His first creation was a tourbillon wristwatch that he exhibited
in Basel in 1991. The response was not very enthusiastic.
“The epoch of the tourbillon had not yet dawned,” Journe says.
The situation gradually changed for the better. Journe worked
for various companies, but more and more people asked him to
sell them the watches he wore on his own wrist. Nonetheless, he
didn’t want to establish a brand of his own nor did he have sufficient
capital to begin serial manufacturing. “So I wore out plenty
of shoe leather until I found 20 customers, each of whom was
willing to order a watch and pay for it in advance. Then I designed
a collection and invented a new mechanism. That took me
two years. I showed these first watches at the trade fair in Basel
in 1999.” The new mechanism was a remontoir d’égalité, which
ensures that the amount of force powering the escapement remains
steady as the mainspring winds down. The watch that
contained the remontoir was called the Tourbillon Souverain.
This time, Journe’s work was well received. Ever since,
Journe has inscribed on his watches the Latin words “Invenit et
Fecit” (“invented and made”), a phrase that 18th-century watchmakers
inscribed on their timepieces to indicate that they had
been approved by France’s Royal Academy of Sciences as original
works.
BORROWING A SLOGAN from the old masters is one thing;
matching their watchmaking skill is another. One of Journe’s
greatest challenges, he recalls, was to create, for the British retailer
Asprey, a Pendule Sympathique, based on the famous
August 2012 WatchTime 93