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En pur autodidacte, il cherche, il tâtonne, il rêve de mécanismes subtils. Il n’a que 20 ans, mais il se passionne pour les créations des grands maîtres du XVIIIe siècle. En 1978, il achève sa première montre de poche à tourbillon, en 1979 le mécanisme d’un Planétaire pour Asprey, à Londres, commandé par les ateliers Brun à Paris.
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Journe, who only recently turned 60, started out in watchmaking at 14, although this was hardly an epiphany. “When I started at the watchmaking school in Marseilles [where he was born], it was a case of any port in a storm,” he says with a smile, hinting at a less than glorious school record. “I was expelled after two years. I then enrolled at the Paris watchmaking school but it’s really in my uncle’s restoration workshop that I became aware of this whole world of collectors.” The very ones who now avidly await his every invention, though nothing could have been further from his mind when he settled down to work, an autodidact feeling his way through the subtle mechanisms that would haunt his dreams. Just 20 years old, he was already entranced by the work of the eighteenth century’s master horologists. He completed his first tourbillon pocket watch in 1978. A year later, Ateliers Brun in Paris commissioned him to design a planetarium mechanism for Asprey in London. “When I started making watches, the only thing I cared about was to get them to work,” he recalls. It wasn’t long before collectors were pressuring him for more. A constant-force tourbillon pocket watch in 1982, a pocket chronometer with automatic winding in 1986, a planetary pocket watch in 1987, a sympathique clock in 1988… with each new piece, François-Paul Journe honed his talent, explored the world of complications and, in 1989, said au revoir to Paris and set off for Sainte-Croix in Switzerland, where he opened a movement manufacturing firm with Denis Flageollet and Vianney Halter. Seven years later he set up his own company, TIM SA, supplying complicated calibres – Chronograph, Striking, Mysterious or Sympathique – to a number of Fine Watch firms. City born and bred, the fresh air and countryside of Vallée de Joux were not for him, and so he upped sticks for the hustle and bustle of Geneva.
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