The Story of Time ( Girard-Perregaux )

12 february 2005

By: WILLY SCHWEIZER February 2006

Girard-Perregaux was founded in the year 1791 but who was the founder? WILLY SCHWEIZER tells us more.

THE story of Girard-Perregaux begins with a watchmaker of Geneva called Jean-François Bautte. Born on March 26, 1772 in a family of simple workers and orphaned at an early age, Bautte was apprenticed at 12, successively learning the crafts of case-maker, engine-turner, watchmaker, jeweller and gem setter. As he trained, he set out to gain an education of which his modest origins had practically deprived him.

He was only 19 when he put his name to his first watches, thereby signalling his second birth, as a master-watchmaker. These early achievements also sowed the seeds of what was ultimately to become the Girard-Perregaux company.

Two years later, for the first time, his name appeared on the city’s commercial register. Bautte rapidly proved himself as a competent businessman. His relations with practically every court of Europe earned him an envied reputation as one of the continent’s leading manufacturers.

He was famous for his charm and thoughtfulness, and possessed an innate sense of style in his relations with others, acutely aware of the difference the right word or gesture could make. When the future Queen Victoria visited his workshop, he remained nonplussed, smiling amiably and easily. Reacting to the queen’s admiration at a craftsman’s dexterity, Bautte spontaneously patted her shoulder, saying “Little Queen, if you only knew just how delicate this work is”.

With his sly humour, Bautte probably long remembered with a secret smile how he outwitted the director of France’s customs bureau. Frustrated at his inability to prevent a growing number of Swiss watches from illegally entering France, he decided to take matters in his own hands and make an example of Geneva’s most prominent watchmaker. Travelling incognito, he purchased a valuable timepiece and asked Bautte to have it delivered to him in France, discreetly of course. Returning to Paris, he warned his agents at the border to be on the alert. But his expensive watch had arrived in Paris exactly when he did, craftily hidden in his own luggage by one of his servants whom Bautte had bribed.

Despite his brilliant career, he never forgot the straightened circumstances of his early years. He made sure his employees enjoyed decent living and working conditions, never hesitating to reward generously their painstaking work and talent. He willingly financed festivities and banquets for the “little people” and on hot summer days, moved all his watchmakers to the cooler and more comfortable premises of his villa in Cologny, near Geneva.

When he died at 65, on Nov 30, 1837, Jean-François Bautte had given the world a wide variety of delightful innovative creations, much admired down to the present day. We shall see in a next article how Bautte’s heritage became Girard-Perregaux.

Willy Schweizer is the curator of Sowind museums. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Swiss watchmaking history.