Review: F. P. Journe Élégante

François-Paul Journe, founder of award-winning watchmaker F.P. Journe, is a man who likes to fix problems. Through decades of making watches, Journe has tackled resonant synchronisation, constant force, chronometric precision—and even gravity. He’s also a man who likes to find problems, whether they really needed fixing or not. In high-end watchmaking, quartz is not a problem that anyone thought needed addressing. A cheap, basic, uninteresting technology, quartz has no place in a modern, luxury watch. F. P. Journe, however, disagrees.

As a fairly new watchmaker to this centuries-old game, F. P. Journe has surely done more than its fair share for the industry, which is exactly why the company has won so many awards and become so coveted. It’s an impressive achievement for sure, especially considering its competition is made up of some of the best known and oldest watchmakers in the world.

Nevertheless, F. P. Journe is a big hit. It’s a business that thrives on pure watchmaking, letting the work do the talking and not the marketing budget, and it’s a big draw for watch collectors. Journe himself has earned a reputation for being a stickler, a very hard man to please, and that fastidious attitude has come to resound with the public in a very tangible way. After all, if a man can be so serious and so particular in his day-to-day life, then imagine how much this is amplified in the passion of his work.

It’s not a watch you buy from F. P. Journe, it’s a legacy. It’s a chain of decisions, one leading to another, executed in perfect rhythm, that lifted the name F. P. Journe from the kid at the back of the class to a name uttered with the greatest respect. Even to this day, every single watch that comes from the brand is one that first existed in the mind of its founder as an idea, or rather, a challenge.

Here’s a couple of examples for you. For the Chronomètre Souverain, Journe decided that he wanted the power reserve meter at three o’clock, despite the keyless works—where the watch is wound and set—being squarely in the way. No matter; Journe simply reengineered the whole thing just to make it fit. And the Astronomic Souverain, a highly complicated watch with eighteen functions; once again Journe decided to make things needlessly difficult for himself and developed the entire thing to be set by just the crown.

A Quartz watch uses a battery to power the movement

You could describe François-Paul Journe as something of a sado-masochist, deliberately choosing the path of most resistance to inflict the pain of problem after problem upon himself. He could just take the simple route, the well-trodden route, just like everyone else, but no—that would be too easy, and I don’t think we’d have ever even heard of the man if he had.

It seems, then, that this search for mechanical gratification has taken Journe to some far and wide places—but perhaps none so leftfield as the Élégante 48. Let’s be clear from the outset; this watch is a quartz. Yes, that same technology that powers a cheap, £10 Casio, is inside this £10,000 F. P. Journe. Surely there must be some mistake? An F. P. Journe is all about mechanical mastery, the perfection of analogue wheels and springs, the refinement of an art that goes back centuries.

It seems that is not the case, because for the Élégante 48, Journe has become quite the glorified electrician. Believe it or not, inside this £10,000 watch is a circuit powered by a button battery just like the one in your weighing scales sat in the kitchen at home.

Perhaps, if you’re new to watches and watchmaking, certainly at this price, you might be wondering why this is a bad thing. Certainly, almost every watch in the world today is powered by a quartz mechanism of some kind, keeping rhythm to the tune of a crystal fragment charged with electricity.

F.P. Journe. watches can cost anywhere between ten and several hundred thousand pounds, if you can find one that is

Well, here’s the thing: quartz and mechanical have a little bit of bad blood between them. Alright, a lot a bit of bad blood. With electrification came developments across the board, and for the age-old industry of watchmaking, no clearer was this than in the very mechanisms that powered them.

So much time, so much thinking, so much effort had gone into perfecting the mechanical escapement, harnessing physics to maintain accurate timekeeping against all odds, to help ships sail the sea, planes navigate the skies, astronomers plot our place in the universe—and just like that, it was over.

There had been a burgeoning rivalry between the Swiss and the Japanese to build the most accurate watch in the world, but whilst each nation competed in public with watches powered by traditional gear and spring, each was working in secret on something very different: quartz. The Swiss struck first with a prototype movement that had been government funded, but the Japanese returned such a mighty blow that it decimated the entire Swiss industry almost overnight.

Many of the Swiss watchmakers we know and love—and many, many more that we no longer remember—fell at the might of the Japanese. The mantel as watchmaking epicentre was passed on, the era of Swiss watchmaking marked at an end.

Originally, to give a watch its glowing lume, a solution—mostly containing radium—was applied to the watches dial. It has since been replaced by a less harmful, less radiative option

So, you can see why it’s unexpected to see this technology housed inside the watch of a prominent mainstay of modern Swiss watchmaking. The nation pulled through after all, thriving on luxury rather than necessity, but nevertheless, quartz is still a sore point. That doesn’t seem to have deterred François-Paul Journe, however, who has decided to tackle the Achilles’ heel of quartz technology anyway: battery life.

If you don’t know, the reason a quartz watch’s second hand ticks and a mechanical watch’s sweeps is to save energy. For a tiny little motor powered by a teensy little battery, a second hand is a big load to move, and so moving it once per second instead of eight yields more life out of a typical battery. Still only two years, mind, compared to a mechanical watch’s ability to run indefinitely, and so that places a quartz watch at a significant disadvantage.

So, what Journe has done with the Élégante 48 is to introduce what is effectively a snooze function. You see that little window at around four o’clock? Looks like there’s a little rotor in there, like for winding the movement, but instead it’s a motion sensor. If the watch remains still for more than half an hour—that is, the rotor doesn’t rotate—the watch goes to sleep and the hands stop moving. For daily use, that extends the life of the battery to eight years. In rotation as part of a collection, up to eighteen years. Pretty much any watch will have already gone in for a service by that point.

It’s unusual to the point of bizarre to see such a high-end, hand-finished approach to making a quartz watch, with every detail approached in the same way it would have been in any other £10,000 F. P. Journe. And there’s even a little surprise thrown in for good measure when the lights go out: just like that £10 Casio, the dial is fully luminous. Perhaps Journe has a sense of humour after all.

You might still be pondering why a man who spends his time making watches worth tens of thousands of pounds might dedicate his time to quartz, and the answer is simple. The mechanical wristwatch, like quartz, is only a fraction of the whole, shared with clocks and pocket watches as well. Journe has dedicated his life to the evolution of all those things, mastering them one by one—so doesn’t it only make sense that he masters quartz as well?

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