n 9 December 1842, “The prefect of the district of Porrentruy informed the Bernese government [to which this French-speaking region, now part of the Republic and Canton of Jura, still belonged] that a shareholders’ company had been set up in Porrentruy with the aim of introducing the watchmaking industry”. We owe this initiative to the prefect Joseph Choffat, who launched an appeal for the “creation of a shareholders’ company to introduce watchmaking to Ajoie [the name of the region around Porrentruy]”.

From the outset, the economic development project initiated by Choffat was accompanied by the necessary vocational training to provide labour for the fledgling industry. This is how, in the hospice housed in the imposing Porrentruy Castle, which was also home to the needy, the old, and abandoned children, the prefect came to set up the first watchmaking workshop aimed at training apprentices.

Porrentruy Castle, where the first watchmaking apprentices’ workshop was set up in 1842.

As the historian Pierre-Yves Donzé writes, Prefect Choffat aimed to “offer vocational training to poor and orphaned children with both a moral and social objective. The aim was to instil in these children values of order, thrift and obedience to enable them to emancipate themselves from pauperism. Watchmaking was the means by which these designs were to be achieved.”

Initially overseen by two master watchmakers, the apprenticeship was intended to promote the ideal of the small manufacturer who achieved independence. Although this initiative did not last and the workshop was forced to close in 1850, it trained 32 apprentices. By 1866, there were already 57 watchmaking workshops in Porrentruy; by 1871, there were 120.

The need to found a veritable watchmaking school soon became urgent. It was created as early as 1882, as “the lack of good workers [was] increasingly making itself felt”. Moreover, as was stated at the meeting that launched its creation, “without scientific knowledge it is impossible to keep abreast of the new improvements which are continually being made in this branch of industry”.

Expansion

A certain Emile Juillard (1853-1941) perfectly illustrates the introduction of the watchmaking industry in the region of Porrentruy. In 1872, he transformed the family assembly workshop into a “comptoir d’horlogerie”, a watch factory producing complete timepieces. He began developing his own calibres in 1890, then launched a variety of brands to sell his own watches, Bulla being the best known, but also Carpe Diem, Carpo and Tilleul. He sold ladies’ watches, men’s watches, key-wound watches and Grande Américaine watches. He also presided over the watchmaking school board from 1900 to 1935. Bulla SA survived until as late as 1973, when it was forced to close, killed by quartz (and other factors).

La Clinique Horlogère archive

La Clinique Horlogère / Indicateur Davoine archives, 1942

Bulla is just one example among many others. Much could also be said about Phénix, a powerful manufacture dating back to 1873, or Helios, with its history dating back to 1883 and which also originated in Porrentruy during the same wave of industrialisation and established a fine reputation.

In 1958, it numbered 100 employees, “conscientious, competent, concerned with the prosperous functioning of the company to which they are bound by loyalty. Hélios is an enterprise where an excellent atmosphere reigns and where the search for new and elegant products take precedence at all times. Its staff and workers work in a pleasant and spacious renovated building, where they feel at ease. It has nothing pretentious about it, but from this calm, peaceful place there emerge every day calendar watches, wristwatches, automatic watches, chronographs – all appreciated by a loyal clientele,” reads an article in Le Bulletin published by the “Association for the Defence of the Interests of the Jura”. By then, the clientele was an international one, as this advertisement, published in 1945 in one of the Europa Star magazines for Latin America, illustrates.

Helios advertisement published in Revista Relojeria/Europa Star in 1945

All this led to the development of a very dense artisanal and industrial network in Ajoie, with Porrentruy at the centre. Riding on this wave, numerous workshops and factories became specialist suppliers, producing cases, parts, tools, fine gemstones and other items.

While scarcely any of these brands on which Porrentruy’s reputation was built have survived, the thriving industrial and artisanal sector that accompanied their growth is still very much alive. Across the Ajoie region – as elsewhere in the Canton of Jura – you will find a slew of businesses derived directly or indirectly from this episode in history, including some major names: casemakers such as Louis Lang, Simon & Membrez and MRP, crystal sapphire specialists like Erma or Sébal, dialmakers such as Vicro, Cadranor and Fraporlux, the great specialist in rubber watch straps Biwi, watch parts manufacturers like AJS, numerous bar-turning enterprises, manufacturers of tools and machinery, electroplating specialists, and so on.

Major brands have their production centres or assembly and casing workshops here, among them Jaeger-LeCoultre, Cartier, Blancpain, TAG Heuer, not to mention the big names who have set up shop in the Canton of Jura, especially in the Franches-Montagnes area, like Richard Mille/Valgine and Maurice Lacroix, as well as a number of independent watchmakers, such as the excellent Vicenterra.

A memorial to this history, brief as it is compared to Switzerland’s other watchmaking regions, can be found at La Clinique Horlogère, while the watchmaking school in Porrentruy, a centre of excellence which trains tomorrow’s watchmakers and operators, bears witness to the vitality present today.

A VISIT TO THE “WATCH CLINIC”

Christian Etienne, founder of La Clinique Horlogère, is both the living memory of watchmaking in the district of Porrentruy (or Ajoie) – for which he has methodically built up an archive – as well as a watchmaker-restorer and, as of recently, the creator of his own eponymous brand. Born in 1965, having been “immersed in watchmaking from his most tender years,” as he says himself, Christian Etienne quite naturally attended the Porrentruy school of watchmaking, emerging in 1985 as a qualified watch repairer. On leaving school, he was sought out with an offer to do a work placement with Rolex in Biel.

Christian Etienne outside his “watch clinic” in Porrentruy. Photo Guillaume Perret

“I assembled watches for two-and-a-half months, and at the end of the work placement, I was offered a permanent job adjusting balances. But I like doing a bit of everything and I couldn’t see myself being tied down to that sole operation.” He turned down the offer and found a job with a retailer in Lausanne, working in after-sales service. He stayed there for 18 months before reclaiming his freedom. In 1987, he founded his Clinique Horlogère, repairing and restoring watches.

The early days were tough. “The locals weren’t well off, they didn’t have much,” he explains. So he put classified ads in Basel newspapers (that city is about 50 kilometres away and Porrentruy was once the seat of the prince-bishops of Basel) and, he says, “work took off”. Basel collectors turned to him to restore their antique watches.

But the real breakthrough came when he replied to an advertisement by Renaud Papi for a watchmaker to assemble complications. After a three-week trial under Stephen Forsey, then head of the complications workshop, he was hired to assemble complicated movements and permitted to do it at home, at his Clinique in Porrentruy. “That lasted a few years and opened many doors to me.”

For example, he was asked to restore timepieces for Omega and Paul Picot, mandated to conduct assessments by specialist watch insurers, called up by Girard-Perregaux to estimate the damages following a burglary at their museum at Villa Marguerite in La Chaux-de-Fonds, sought out to estimate the value of the timepieces in the Audemars Piguet Museum and became the official expert providing such estimates in the courts. At the same time, he restored numerous watches and clocks from all over the world – the US, Germany, Italy, even Japan. He was also called on to restore some historically important clocks.

Christian Etienne in his Clinique Horlogère, March 2024. Photo Guillaume Perret

One of his greatest exploits came in July 2004. “The CompliTime manufacture, (Robert Greubel & Stephen Forsey) contacted me for a once-in-a-lifetime job,” he recounts. “We arranged a meeting in La Chaux-de-Fonds, and there I was presented with a prototype for a planetarium. My mission, if I was willing to take it on, would be to assemble a similar movement in which the bridges, originally in brass, would be replaced by titanium bridges.

The Richard Mille Planetarium. Astronomical representations and indications: rotation of the earth on its axis, rotation of the earth around the sun, obliquity of the earth, rotation of the moon on its axis, rotation of the moon around the earth, phases of the moon, equation of time, Mercury, Venus, sun. Materials used: titanium, steel, brass, gold, silver, tungsten. The mainspring barrel is designed to have a serviceable life of around 350 years. Each of its parts can be made anew in the future.

There were 1,400 parts in all, including 550 screws. How this Planétarium was to look was as yet unknown; the exterior design was the task of Valgine & Richard Mille, who had commissioned it. Whether or not to accept a mission of that importance wasn’t a decision to be taken lightly. So I asked for permission to take the movement to Porrentruy to study it in detail.” Three years of work were followed by the razzle-dazzle of presentations in Paris, Tokyo, Moscow, Dubai and Doha alongside Richard Mille. (We talk about the role of Richard Mille in Porrentruy below, in Back to School.)

Mad about archives

Accompanying him on this career path was another passion: archives. And when we say archives, we refer as much to the watches themselves, which take centre stage, as to paper documentation – plans, writings, advertisements, registers – and any physical movements and parts you might come across – cogwheels, hairsprings, blanks, ébauches, screws, mainsprings, etc. The list is never-ending.

Screenshot of the website www.christian-etienne.com

The immensely methodical Christian Etienne collects, groups, studies, classifies and records all these “testimonials” to a local watchmaking past long gone – yet sometimes so close. Among his perfectly ordered mountain of components, he will find this or that missing part; as for the paper archives, he classifies them in the same way, disseminates, presents and explains them on his website (cliniquehorlogere.ch). And he has a speciality: chronographs. He records and describes in detail all the existing chronograph movements in a database which is available on the same website.

An Omega 267 calibre before and after restoration

His passion has also led him to mount exhibitions, such as one on Russian watchmaking, or another on “Promotional objects in high-end watchmaking”. He is a man of many interests. This immersion both physical and intellectual in the horology of yore gives him a depth of perspective and a sharp eye which he puts to use in creating his own watches.

A brand of his own

In 2019, Christian Etienne began working on chronographs. He rebuilt the Valjoux movements 23 and 22 from top to bottom, taking them apart completely, starting again from scratch, blueing the functional parts and putting the whole thing back together again. “My customers kept asking me why I didn’t create my own brand. They kept pushing me, but I said to myself, creating a brand involves financial resources, publicity…too much work. But they insisted: simple watches, with movements that have a history, not from ETA, something different… So I made four watches using Peseux movements, four cases, four dials, etc. And then I got started.”

The Christian Etienne 267 model with small-seconds subdial

One calibre in particular interested him, one he was very familiar with, having worked at Omega – the Omega 30mm calibre, manufactured between 1939 and 1963, of which three million were made.

“It’s a calibre with ideally proportioned parts, thanks to which it’s extremely smooth-running. For example, the escapement is the smallest possible for this type of calibre and is combined with a barrel and balance the surface of which is extended to the absolute limit. This balance was improved over the years, taking into account the latest technological advances in watchmaking. In 1942, an Incabloc shock absorber was used for the first time to protect the balance from shocks and vibrations. From 1950, the bimetallic screw balance was replaced by a Glucydur balance made from a copper-based alloy – a monometallic balance which is not affected by magnetic fields. Because of its simplicity, reliability, robustness and high chronometric precision it’s the calibre watchmakers prefer,” he explains. The drawers of his “archive” contain all kinds of them, dating from 1943 to 1963.

These calibres he first of all strips down completely, cleaning each component, checking its quality and restoring or repairing what is damaged, worn or broken. He then reworks the bridges, satin-finishes them, precision-polishes the angles, laps the upper surface by hand, rhodium-plates the plate for maximum reflection of light inside the movement, blues the index assembly and screws, sometimes applying his beautiful “random circular graining”, then adjusts, reassembles and regulates the whole thing.

The Christian Etienne 30SC-R model with centre seconds

With a prototypist and the assistance of his son, a watch repairer and designer, he designed his own screw-back case (39mm in diameter), his own concave-tipped watch hands, his own understated dials for optimal legibility and launched small series of five, six or eight timepieces with a central seconds hand or a small-seconds dial, depending on the model. Round, simple, pared-back, ergonomic watches made in stainless steel and with sapphire crystals on both sides, waterproof thanks to their screw-back cases.

Needless to say, these watches are made from A to Z with the assistance of a group of artisans from the Porrentruy area, Ajoie and the Canton of Jura. With one single exception: the hands, which he had made somewhat further afield, in Biel – a whole 60 kilometres away! But much closer to the Clinique is the school where Christian now has to rush off to, because he also teaches there…

BACK TO SCHOOL

As we saw earlier, the need for a watchmaking school in Porrentruy was formulated as early as 1882. The school itself opened two years later, in 1884. Since then, it has undergone numerous transformations and in the 1970s nearly closed down altogether. It picked up steam again in the 1990s and today is a flourishing part of the EPT vocational college, standing for École Professionnelle Technique, itself part of the vast and vibrant “Cité des Microtechniques” on the outskirts of Porrentruy.

The main building of Porrentruy’s Cité des Microtechniques, at the centre of a vast space comprising around ten buildings and structures. These include the Jurassica Dinotec, an open-air museum created after the discovery during extension work of fossilised dinosaur tracks. As a nod to future watchmakers (and others), two clocks give visitors a better understanding of geological time (millions of years) compared with precision time measurement (milliseconds).

Claude Maître, director of the CEJEF (the technical division of the Jura Teaching and Training Centre), tells us straight off: “I’m a silo breaker”. What does he mean by that? Here, at the EMT (École des Métiers Techniques), students indeed come to learn the watchmaking trade, but every day they associate and have to collaborate with fellow students in micro-mechanics or micro-engineering design whose plans they have to learn to read, students in automation and robotisation who design the tools they will be using, students in microtechnology quality, future chemical laboratory staff and mechanical engineers.

In other words, four hundred full-time students, not counting the apprentices doing on-the-job training in a company while learning the theory at the EPT. All in all, 720 students populate its corridors every week, taught by a staff of more than 80 teachers. Grist for the mill of many transdisciplinary projects – “across silos”.

A partnership between the worlds of industry and training

The days of the very first apprentices’ workshop in the hospice of Porrentruy Castle are long gone. In the view of historian Pierre-Yves Donzé, the various vocational schools founded in the second half of the 19th century were often the result of “the initiative of a social elite opposed to industrialisation – which required an increasingly large quantity of labour, but one in which skills were not the priority”.

A school piece pocket watch, 1984. La Clinique Horlogère archive

The artisans and small-scale businesses were also keen to perpetuate their know-how to be able to survive. Again in the historian’s view, it was only between the two wars that “the industrialists turned to the vocational schools, when their labour needs became more specialised and greater technical knowledge was required of their workers”.

Today, although things have changed a lot and the now requisite interdisciplinarity has considerably broadened the scope of knowledge and how it is taught, which is geared much more to the student’s personal development, “the companies and the school are deeply interlocked,” says Claude Maître. ”You can justifiably talk of a partnership between the worlds of industry and training.”

And not only because of the dual training course which includes on-the-job training (such as with Horlogerie Allaine, owned by Patek Philippe, Maurice Lacroix, Richard Mille/Valgine, or with Mercier which assembles and regulates watches), which is open to some 24 apprentices a year for a three-year course. Various programmes are also organised in partnership with manufactures and institutions (such as the regulation competition at Patek Philippe, the chronometry competition at the COSC, as well as some joint projects – more about that later).

SSC competition, 2016, ETA 6498 calibre; Zenith El Primero, 1990, calibre 40. La Clinique Horlogère archive

Overseeing all this is the Swiss government and the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), which conducts an assessment every five years and sets the framework for the programmes and partnerships with the world of industry.

And so it is no exaggeration to talk of the intertwining of the State, training and industry and now even the arts and crafts. Just like industrialists, teachers need to be able to respond and adapt to societal, social, technological and cultural changes and developments in a society which is becoming increasingly fluid and fast-moving.

Claude Maître reminds us that, after the school’s “golden age” in the 1920s when it boasted more than 50 students, each of whom, during their three years, had to produce three watches – a Lépine pocket watch, a full hunter pocket watch and a LeCoultre repeater – it was on the verge of closing down, unable to adapt to the quartz crisis of 1973. At the very time the school was erecting new buildings, watchmaking was collapsing. The school was left with just eight students… It was ordered to close, but was saved by the director of the time who succeeded in keeping it going until its return to favour in the 1990s, with the renaissance of mechanical watchmaking, renewed appeal and the resulting migration of mechanical watches to the high end of the market. The fact is that training and industry, education and economy “go together like a horse and carriage” – you can’t have one without the other.

Training course

Students on the most advanced training course, lasting four years, graduate as qualified watchmaker-repairers with a Certificat Fédéral de Capacité (CFC). Basically, at the end of the course, the future watchmakers (and today, girls and boys have attained parity in the watchmaking sector, unlike other technical fields where girls represent only 20% overall) have to be able to execute the whole gamut of watchmaking tasks, viz.: assemble all the components of a mechanical movement, including additional mechanisms; do the case finishing and adjustment, including mounting and adjusting the regulating organ; case-up and mount the external parts, check the functions and water resistance; repair or replace defective or rusted parts and produce new ones by case stamping, be capable of milling, filing, shaping, drilling, etc., and be familiar with industrial methods, including drawing up and planning production routes.

The school watch

A crucial part of this course is the production of a school watch, as Raphaël Breuleux, teacher and ex-watchmaker with Richard Mille, explains. “The students work up to it gradually over their four years,” he says. “At the moment, we’re working on old Cortébert movements, 19-ligne calibres with a frequency of 18,000 vph, for which the plans we have date back to 1937. We have a batch of these calibres in the form of ébauches. Each student has to reproduce the entire watch with a mixture of old parts and parts that have to be completely remade.”

From ébauche to finished school watch

He adds: “The first year, the students make four or five components, the second year they’ll tackle the whole barrel with the spring and cover, and the third and fourth years they start the finishing, chamfering, assembly and adjustment. On the bare plate they’ll learn how to satin-finish, draw flanks, tap, drive in jewels, punch in pins, estimate tolerances, and read and understand the plans drawn up by the design students next door.”

Around the classrooms with their rows of watchmakers’ benches are other, auxiliary workshops: those of the micromechanics, the designers’ office, the metrologists’ lab, the engineering office, the prototyping workshops and, right next door, an Industry 4.0 area in the guise of a smart factory, where students are actively initiated into robotics and interconnectivity, including with machining.

An almost complete manufacture in miniature.

No ordinary projects

With his students, master clockmaker Laurent Barotte, the laureate of the 2022 Gaïa Prize and workshop tutor in the Horology section, undertakes what he describes as “no ordinary projects”. Take the Epmosphère project, for example, which consisted of restoring a historical clock with moving spheres for the Kunskamera Museum in St. Petersburg, or Richard Mille’s Clock from Jura, a gift from the Canton of Jura to the Province of Québec. Not to mention the renovation of the clock of Porrentruy Town Hall, which also involved historical research.

The history of the Epmosphère project to restore Dupressoir’s clock with moving spheres, the product of a cooperation agreement between the Canton of Jura and Russia, is a long, delicate and beautiful story of horology and human endeavour. It took more than 5,000 hours of work to restore this sublime and complex clock dating from 1794-1795 and return it to its owner, the Kunstkamera Museum in St. Petersburg.

Detail of the clock with moving spheres built by Joseph Dupressoir in Paris around 1794- 1795. It shows duodecimal time, the phases and age of the moon, decimal time (the time system of the French Revolution) the full calendar and world time.

It is impossible here to go into all the twists and turns of the restoration of such a historic timepiece. But this intensive joint experience between the Porrentruy school and the watchmaking section of Morteau vocational college (see Europa Star 3/2023) in collaboration with Vaucher Manufacture, atokalpa and numerous other partners, was a profound educational exercise both manual and intellectual, which called for vast knowledge of history, materials science and mechanical complications.

But it is also an example of cross-collaboration between two schools, within the schools, and between the schools and the companies, which just goes to show that watchmaking is never a purely solitary exercise, but is fed by exchange and collaboration. The very name of the operation sums it up: the Epmosphère project, from Écoles, Porrentruy, Morteau and SPHERE for the clock.

The Clock from Jura

The monumental Clock from Jura by Richard Mille facing the City Hall of Quebec City was a completely different but equally wild experience for Laurent Barotte and his students at the Porrentruy school – one that could not have happened anywhere else than in the Swiss Republic and Canton of Jura. The French-speaking Jura, which long struggled to regain its independence and throw off the tutelage of the German-speaking Canton of Bern, and only recovered its democratic sovereignty in 1978, has always had a historical ally in the French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec, where the same desire for independence is rife. On the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec City, the Republic and Canton of Jura decided to offer Quebec a major gift – a monumental clock for future generations.

The Clock from Jura by Richard Mille. ©Didier Gourdon

The idea was hatched jointly by the Republic and Canton of Jura authorities, Dominique Guenat, the CEO of Montres Valgine and close associate and right-hand man of Richard Mille, and the Porrentruy school of watchmaking. It took six years to complete the project and for the clock to be inaugurated in Quebec in September 2014, in the gardens facing City Hall.

The clock is driven by a mechanical movement weighing 150 kilos, “a giant, wholly innovative prototype unlike any other in the long history of watchmaking (…) an F1 engine assembled with tweezers under a magnifying glass, a watch of grandiose dimensions,” says Laurent Barotte. The balance alone, made of Invar, weighs 19 kilos: it ensures accuracy to two seconds a month.

A student working on a component of the Clock from Jura

It has two faces, a very rare feature in clocks. It shows the time, of course, but also the equation of time. In addition to that, it is a hundred-year perpetual calendar – powered by an electromagnetic system – which displays its indications on six aluminium cylinders driven by a micromotor. The clock is equipped with an extremely rare constant-force device called a remontoire.

Stéphane Berdat, at the time in charge of Cooperation on behalf of the Republic and Canton of Jura – who in passing salutes the “total commitment of Richard Mille for no financial compensation or market gain, just a beautiful, gratuitous act” – praises the contribution of the Porrentruy school to this highly complex venture.

20 September 2014, Richard Mille and students of the Porrentruy school of watchmaking at the inauguration of the Clock from Jura.

“Listening to the main people involved, the requirements of this clock went way beyond the school’s usual framework of action. And the timescale of a school, the vocation of which is to transmit knowledge, isn’t comparable with that of a company, the vocation of which is to produce. They work at different rhythms and under different constraints.” But in the same breath he points out the total commitment both of the teachers and the students to realising the project.

For him this project had the merit of combining the necessary knowledge of watchmaking tradition with an avant-garde openness of mind to contemporary, open-minded and forward-looking watchmaking. “Teaching is not filling a vessel, but kindling a fire,” as Aristophanes said and Montaigne endorsed. Let’s say that the watchmaking “fire” kindled in Porrentruy in the mid-19th century is still burning bright.