Breguet

The workshop on the Quai de l’Horloge, on the Île de la Cité, quickly found clients at the French court: Abraham-Louis Breguet had been introduced there by his mathematics teacher, and Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette bought his watches.^1, 4, 6

The Revolution drove him back to Switzerland in 1793. He returned to Paris in 1795 and rebuilt a clientele that reached Russia and the Ottoman court and included Napoleon Bonaparte. On June 26, 1801, he was granted a patent for the tourbillon, a regulator meant to improve a watch’s precision; he was made watchmaker to the French Royal Navy in 1815 and died in 1823.^1, 2, 6

Breguet says its long series of commissions for Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples, led to the first watch designed specifically to be worn on the wrist, ordered in 1810.^1, 4

His son Antoine-Louis ran the business after him, and his grandson Louis-Clément from 1833, but the family’s interest turned to electricity and scientific instruments. In 1870 Louis-Clément sold the watchmaking business to his workshop manager, Edward Brown, and the Brown family kept it for a hundred years.^1, 4

In 1970 the Paris jewellers Chaumet bought Breguet and concentrated it on complicated high-end watches, opening a workshop in the Vallée de Joux in the Swiss Jura in 1976. The investment company Investcorp took over in 1987 and added the movement maker Nouvelle Lémania, which gradually became Breguet’s own manufacture; a new building at L’Abbaye followed in 1994.^1, 4

The Swatch Group bought the Breguet group from Investcorp in 1999, one of the purchases of the consolidation years, and Nicolas G. Hayek became its chief executive. The manufacture at L’Orient was expanded until 2015, and after Hayek’s death in 2010 his grandson Marc A. Hayek took charge.^{1, 3, 4, 8}