Watchlords

Quill & Pad: You have written books about Breguet. Do you have secret archives in the manufacture? And where do you keep all the historical documents?



Emmanuel Breguet: I indeed am fortunate to be in charge of heritage at Montres Breguet and to have had this fabulous opportunity to write the history of the house. There had been other books about Breguet, mostly catalogues and descriptions of collections, timepieces, or inventions, but the life of Breguet and the sum of its different aspects such as him being the head of a company, for example, had not been studied before. I feel immensely fortunate to have been able to do it. As you mention it very correctly, a historian needs his sources.

My research included the study of archives belonging to the house of Breguet as the company has always continued to record its production on paper. Today, within these archives we have records of all the timepieces that were made from the end of the eighteenth century. It means we can find a description of the object, but also the date when it was manufactured, the start and end date of assembly, we can read about the difficulties involved in making it, and the time it took to deliver the piece. We have the dates, but we also know to whom the watch was sold. So today we use this data to write the history of the house and we also use it in our communication as we can claim facts and prove that they are true.

Aside from the Montres Breguet archives, in the research for the book I studied some archives and documents that remained with the Breguet family, which testify to the life of the family and tell about the relationship with some clients who had correspondence with Breguet.

In addition to private archives, I also accessed public archives like the national French archives and those of the French Academy of Sciences, for example.


https://quillandpad.com/2022/07/28/emma ... -148785505