Marie Antoinette's Watch: Adultery, Larceny, & Perpetual Motion

by John Biggs

  And Geneva proper did produce many beautiful and sophisticated watches. One, a delicately wrought tulip watch encased by thin, curved panes of rock crystal, used an ingenious set of hinges to open like a transparent flower and reveal the watch within. The fad for these so-called form watches – including crucifix-shaped watches for the clergy – was followed by a glut of astronomical calendars created for Muslim customers, their cases and movements delicately engraved with the repeating motifs popular in the Levant and Turkey. (One Genevan group even moved to Constantinople, which for men accustomed to the bridling strictures of Geneva was a playground; these watchmakers, according to a visiting Genevan minister, lived in “complete license without religion or any restraint, so that they are a subject of great scandal.”)35

  Such a delicate marriage of aesthetics and horology was unusual for the time, and Geneva became an international hub for horological commerce. Middle Eastern merchants would visit Switzerland to pick up Genevan watches of the period, and Swiss watches were also exported all over the world, ending in far-flung courts in Turkey, Russia, India, and China. Orders flowed in at a clip from the fashion hub of France, too, forcing the Jurassien farmers to maintain a grueling pace.

  The pressing demand for Swiss watches in the seventeenth century led to the establishment of the etablissage, a mode of manufacturing named after the workbench, or etabli. The master watchmaker, or etablisseur, would plan his inventory and pass out raw materials to various shops and workhouses in the area. He would then collect the pieces and assemble, time (that is, check), and case the watches in his own shop, thereby ensuring he didn’t run afoul of strict guild laws that limited, for example, the number of journeymen allowed in any one shop. By spreading out the work to rough ebaucheurs (makers of the ebauche, or core parts of the watch movement), these early industrialists were able to speed the production of a watch from one man month — one man working on the whole watch from stem to stern for a full month — to about a week, although more complex watches still took months, if not years, to complete. The disparity between the high wages of the Geneva master and the low ones of his workers in the mountains began to grate on some French and German businessmen who saw the Genevans as taking unfair advantage of peasant labor. “That’s why Geneva is so prodigiously rich,” a French official complained to a Swiss diplomat; “that’s why 25,000 inhabitants of Geneva have more money than the 450,000 citizens of the duchy of Savoy and the 800,000 citizens of the neighboring departments.”36

  This also brings up a point that still plagues the Swiss watch industry today. If all of the parts are made by farmers, does the master have the right to put his (and it was always a “he”) name on the dial? What constitutes Swiss made or French or British if many of the parts came from Switzerland. Even today the moniker “Swiss Watch” is sharply protected by the Swiss guilds and certain rules were set up to ensure that interlopers couldn’t slap “Swiss Made” on their watches and live to tell the tale.

  Incidentally, these days a Swiss watch — a timepiece that bears the Swiss Made label — must have a movement assembled in Switzerland and is “cased” or completed in Switzerland. This, of late, has been a very strict requirement although, even as late as the early 2000s, watches that were made mostly in Switzerland could hold the coveted label. In short, assembly is the most important factor and the source of parts is often overlooked.

  The Swiss tradition created a hereditary group of skilled watchmakers, metal smiths, and grinders high in the mountains who were masters at the hand production of tiny screws and gears. Watchmaking paid better than almost any other trade, and “from the age of eight or nine children [could] earn much more at it than the cost of their keep.”37 By 1760, eight hundred master watchmakers made their homes in Geneva. They had perfected their art to the extent that they were able to produce eighty-five thousand watches a year.

  While watchmaking in Switzerland often meant clock making — the marine chronometers and ornate wall and mantle clocks that graced the houses of nobles and the intelligentsia — the rest of Europe had a growing passion for the new pocket watches, the more expensive and complex the better.

  In France, watchmaking intersected directly with the lives of a number of Enlightenment figures. It was an age in which the border between expert and dilettante was permeable. The gentlemen farmers and boulevardiers who eventually redefined the concept of science often got their start tinkering with watches and clocks. Almost every major inventor and scientist of the era built a clock when he was a youngster, the process being a test of a future scientist’s mettle. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born the son of a watchmaker. Voltaire owned several watchmaking factories, and he saw, in the inexorable ticking of a watch, nothing less than proof of God’s existence: “The world embarrasses me,” he wrote, “and I cannot dream that this watch exists and has no watchmaker.”

  French watchmakers were proud of their work, and rightly so. While the Swiss were masters at mass production, the French were creating new and better complications and perfecting the marine chronometer for their own navy. French watchmakers found Swiss watches to be “only good enough and nothing better,”38 while demand for fine watches increased steadily thanks to the profligate French court. A steady influx of watchmakers streamed into the royal capital, where they elbowed for room at the king’s side.

  The first pocket watch appeared in about 1510 in Nurnemberg when a German locksmith, Peter Henlein, created the “Egg,” a unique globe-shaped clock about four inches in diameter that could hang around the neck into a pocket. The Nuremberg Egg had only one hand, but it was the first watch to use a forty-hour mainspring, meaning a spring that unwound itself over the course of almost two days. Until then, the only mainsprings available lasted for less than a day. Henlein had to deal with a number of issues while building his Egg including the pounding out of the immensely long mainspring – many clocks of this type had springs as long as ninety inches – and finding iron with a high purity so the powerful spring would not shatter. Henlein went on to create perfume-filled “pomander” clocks, which slowly released their scent as they told time.39

  The egg quickly shrunk and flattened out, evolving over the centuries into something more recognizable and considerably more complex. Dandies in Paris were constantly consulting their sophisticated timepieces, and the sound of a gentleman’s chimes — the tiny bells inside each watch that told the hour when activated — was as telling as the cut of his coat.

  For centuries, nobles had worn their watches on their belts or around their necks on chains. But an eighteenth century rise in watch thefts had led watch owners to hide the devices in their vest or pants pockets. Because “fashion abhors bulges,”40 the “old-school, finically ornamented watches” with which Washington was familiar were quickly going out of style.

  Not every French watch was a masterpiece. The overwhelming majority of the watches sold in Paris were mere adornments. These simple watches, with parts made in Geneva (and sometimes smuggled illegally in wagons of malodorous fish to prevent customs officials from examining the loads too closely) and cases made in France, were inlaid in colored enamel with faces depicting a pastoral scene. Nobles would trade these cheap watches with each other and give them out as gifts at royal functions. “[T]he marriage corbeille of a noble lady would be filled with them,” a historian would later write, “each more lavish than the next, more than she could possibly use; so the custom arose of keeping some and distributing the others among friends.”41

  By 1775, research in France, England, and Switzerland was coming together to create unique new models of timekeeping for landowners and royalty alike. Swiss watchmakers were known for their business skills and their ability to manufacture almost all the parts of complicated watches. England was well-known for military technology, including improvements to the fit and finish of marine chronometers designed to survive long months — even years — at sea. France had a way with engraving, lacquering, and precious metals, and, with watchmakers like Le Roy,
Berthoud, and Lepaute inventing a new, more elegant escapements (the part of a watch that regulated its speed), which allowed for a thinner movement, had become the leader in the state of the art.

  Everywhere, the industry was being transformed. The old model of piecework was still in force and would be for centuries to come, but watchmakers were experimenting with new methods of manufacturing that revolved around specifically engineered machines and processes such as pantographs, drills, and milling machines, and the faster, more standardized work they enabled.

  Watchmaking was a booming business. By 1780, some Swiss factories were putting out forty-thousand watches a year – a ten fold improvement over the production at Voltaire’s own factories in Fernay just ten years before.42 Ownership of a single, simple watch, then, was nothing special – anyone could have one for about a day’s wages, and production was so high that there is still, today, a glut of Louis XVI-era timepieces on the market. To truly stand out at court, members of the queen’s and king’s inner circle had to own the latest, most sophisticated timepieces, and the number of complications was the yardstick by which fine watches were measured.

  At that trick, only one man truly excelled.

  Chapter 6

  Neuchâtel

  The man who, more than anyone else, would provide the greatest timepieces of his age might never have discovered his talent were it not for a tragedy that befell the Breguet family when little Abraham-Louis (or Abram-Louis in the local dialect) was eleven years old.

  Abraham-Louis had been born, on January 10, 1747, to an extended family in Neuchâtel, a small city north of Geneva that was built primarily of lake sandstone, which gave the buildings a yellow cast that led Alexandre Dumas to describe it as a “an immense toy carved out of butter.” The town nestles against the base of Mount Chaumont along the vast Lake Neuchâtel, where most of the low-lying farmland was reclaimed from the water43 and a stately, palatial collegiate church tower still chimes the hours.

  Breguet went to schools in the area but was neither a very precise nor an eager student. In fact, according to contemporary histories, “he appeared hopelessly stupid, and his masters agreed that he was deficient in intellect;” the “young man received his instructions with great repugnance.”44 His father, Jonas-Louis, was a merchant – he sold lace and bobbins and cloth — and the boy lived a life of relative comfort, first in the city and later at his family’s inn at Les Verrieres, near Switzerland’s border with France. At the inn, purchased by his father in order to gain some financial security and to be closer to his family in the area, young Abraham-Louis spent his evenings listening to travelers and merchants passing through as they described the lights of Paris or the mighty ships of Seville.

  It would have been an uneventful youth, but in early 1758 his father died of an unknown illness (probably influenza), leaving four children and a pregnant wife, Suzanne-Marguerite. She had already lost two baby boys in recent years, and Jonas-Louis’ death pushed the family into despair. It was decided that they would move from the inn back into town, where they would be closer to the extended clan, and the family began looking for a new husband for the widow — someone who could keep the family comfortable while she raised the children.

  That summer, Suzanne-Marguerite married her husband’s cousin, a handsome twenty-nine-year-old soldier named Jacques Tattet. Abraham-Louis, now twelve, moved with his family to a wide-gabled house in town, and never attended school again. Though struggling with the loss of his father, his new stepfather intrigued the boy. A lieutenant-captain in the militia, Tattet had studied watchmaking and now had a watch export business that sold Genevese watches to customers in Paris. Tattet, however, wished the trade were the other way around. Disappointed with the quality of most mass-produced Swiss watches, he was enamored with the work coming out of France in those years and so, with his siblings’ help, pointed his efforts at Versailles where he could both sell his wares and spy on the watchmakers already working in the state of the art.

  The Tattet brothers aspired to a higher echelon. Their name was already well known in Paris and Geneva, and their small firm enjoyed the favor of the French court. Now, they sought still more visibility in that burgeoning and lucrative market. They visited Paris often, and in 1762 they decided that young Abraham-Louis would leave home and school to become an apprentice to a watchmaker in Les Verrieres and then in Neuchâtel, with the expectation that eventually he would join his stepfather and uncles on their trips to the French capital. Having shown little interest in formal education, the boy now had to help support the family. He left his small town and took to the bench, beginning his apprenticeship by cleaning the workshop and organizing and polishing the parts that arrived from the various mountain farms.

  The apprenticeship would have appealed to any adolescent boy. Watchmakers’ lives weren’t all hard work. They were lured from shop to shop with promises of riches, long weekends in the country, private clubs in which to relax, and, in one instance, a master who promised a “new hat with a gold border and a new peruke” to his new employees. They were feted, lauded, and considered singularly respectable in the pantheon of eighteenth-century professions.

  Adventure, too, awaited them. Watchmakers were held for ransom by Barbary pirates so often that when travelling by ship, they wrote clauses into their contracts stating that their employer would pay for their freedom if and only if that they would not give up their watches to the captors.45 Jacques Barthelemy, the grandson of the founder of the watch house Vacheron Constantin (then called Vacheron-Chossat), found “banditry” and frontier justice to be another threat to the watchmaker. While travelling to Rome through northern Italy, he found human “arms and legs nailed to posts, as a sign to travelers that brigands had been executed there because they had committed murder.” Luckily the watchmakers lost no limbs on the journey.

  Dangers aside, a skilled craftsman could make a nice living, even without a full gentleman’s education. Breguet’s family had been nearly destitute before Tattet stepped in, and if the boy showed even a modicum of talent, he could make good money in the storefronts of London and Paris. Watchmakers typically made 20-25 Swiss francs a day, compared with 3-4 francs for the average craftsman.

  The process of entering the guild was arduous, requiring seven years of apprenticeship — five as a water boy, fire tender, and, eventually, beginning watchmaker, and then two travelling from master to master to learn specific techniques including goldsmithing, plate production, and enameling. The more ambitious watchmakers went on to learn the art of complications and often were required to produce a series of complicated watches — watches with multiple features including chimes, moonphase registers, and perpetual calendars — as a final test before being afforded journeyman status. Even as journeymen, however, they were still forced to work under a supervisor who would sign and sell all of the watches in a particular shop.

  A watchmaker’s training included the creation of parts from whole metal. One test of watchmaking prowess asked the students prepare a miniature rod, adding facets, points, arcs, and holes to a piece of steel the size of a toothpick. This, in turn, led to the carving of hands and fine springs from pure steel, creating thinner and more brittle objects until the student could do it consistently without the aid of machines.

  From the moment Abraham-Louis began his apprenticeship under Tattet’s tutelage46 he took to watchmaking with unusual zeal. Even as an apprentice, it was clear that he had a flair for the scientific and talents in astronomy and mathematics as well as drafting. His hurried drawings were primitive but effective – just a few slashes on a sheet of paper often distilled extremely complex concepts – and his formal drawings were wondrously detailed. This talent for design gave him a distinct advantage. Because most watchmakers were not formally trained, an understanding of the rudiments of physics and optics was enough to turn an unschooled bench worker into a skilled craftsman and businessman. With a bit of study, the Tattets decided, young Abraham-Louis would become an excellent watch
designer.

  Watchmaking could be a frustrating and expensive proposition. Each individual piece came from a sheet of metal — usually brass but sometimes gold or silver — and had to be painstakingly cut out, milled, and polished. Safety systems on machines were primitive at best, and when a drill or grinder overshot the mark, an entire day’s work could be ruined. The tips of the tools only barely touched the metal in most cases, nipping off thin slices of brass, silver, or gold in a rapid, repetitive motion that could best be described as a dance – a turn, a slide, a return to the start. Gears, for example, were first cut or stamped out as metal disks and then placed on another cutter that moved the disk an infinitesimally short distance to the next spot for the drill or file to come down and cut away a notch. Only a patient and delicate hand could coax the finest and most ornate of shapes out of otherwise imperfect metal. The tools employed, which are still in use today, removed just enough metal from a surface to allow for the addition of gears or jewels or the creation of beautifully engraved surfaces.

  The watchmakers who worked at the fabrique, or watch factory, were called fabriquers, and unlike, for example, dressmakers or wigmakers to the wealthy who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to bring glamour to the merchant’s wife or the baroness, these fabriquers enjoyed a quality of life and education shared by few other craftsmen. Because they mingled with the aristocracy, it was expected that they understand philosophy, politics, and science. During the day, many of them would sit working by the large windows of their ateliers while one of them would read aloud from the newspaper or a book, a habit copied later by lectores in tobacco factories in the New World who read the news of the day to busy rollers.