It never went away, but it definitely slumped. And now, suddenly, the French watch industry is showing the green shoots of recovery. When President George W. Bush left office in , one British tabloid newspaper offered him a fond farewell by running a list of his "most memorable malapropisms, mispronunciations and mangled statements. Whether the former leader of the free world actually said this or not β it's been disputed β the comment played perfectly to Britain's insatiable appetite for ridiculing the powerful β and the French.
The French, meanwhile, were stung. France's problem was not so much that it lacked entrepreneurs, but that its thrusting capitalist minds were defecting overseas in a bid to avoid the old republic's crippling tax system. One group of French entrepreneurs even gathered under the moniker " les pigeons ," or "suckers," to lobby the government in a bid to stop the brain drain.
While much has been said about French business since, little of it has been reported through the lens of the French watch industry. France, once a great watchmaking nation, has had little to contribute to the horological landscape over the last half century. But it's never been entirely out of the picture. Now, suddenly, there are signs of recovery. Over the past decade, French watchmaking ennui has given way to a watchmaking nouvelle vague. Baltic, March LA. B, Reservoir, Hegid, and Fugue are just a handful of the French watch companies founded in the past ten years or so.
For the first time in generations, there is momentum in the French watch industry. Those on the inside can feel it. March LA. And we will kill the watch king and queen β¦ ". Some explain the uptick as a symptom of a national shift in mood. This new generation of French watch business owners have history on their side. Whether it was the watchmaking Huguenots escaping over the border into neighboring Switzerland under persecution from the Catholics in the 16th and 17th centuries, or Abraham-Louis Breguet making watches for King Louis XVI and his wife Queen Marie-Antoinette from his Paris atelier a century later, France's role in establishing the watchmaking tradition is hugely significant.
As much to their advantage are France's geographical links to the Swiss watch industry. Pequignet, founded in , recently pumped fresh life into French watchmaking with a new in-house manufacture calibre, made in France. And it can't hurt that France is one of the world's luxury capitals. While that may be true, French luxury watchmaking gets no help from the biggest names in French luxury.
