While Cartier has always been one of the most important names in watches, historically its reputation has been built as much around design as traditional watchmaking. The Tank, Santos, Tortue and Crash are all important because of their shapes and proportions rather than mechanical complexity, giving Cartier a position within watchmaking that very few other manufactures occupy.
Towards the end of the 1990s, however, Cartier began placing considerably greater emphasis on its mechanical watchmaking. The result was the Collection Privée Cartier Paris, better known today simply as CPCP. Produced between 1998 and 2008, the collection revisited some of Cartier's most important historical designs and paired them with high-grade mechanical movements from manufactures including Piaget, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Girard-Perregaux and others.
Among the most important watches to emerge from CPCP was the Tortue Monopoussoir. The Tortue itself dates back to 1912 and was one of Louis Cartier's earliest wristwatch designs, while the first Tortue Monopoussoir appeared in 1928. Almost seventy years later, Cartier returned to the idea for CPCP, retaining the distinctive tortoise-shaped case while completely reworking the watch for the modern era.
Here, we have the reference 2396, crafted from 18-carat white gold and measuring approximately 34mm by 43mm. The proportions are particularly good, with the curved sides of the Tortue case flowing naturally into its short lugs. More importantly, there are no conventional chronograph pushers disrupting the shape of the case. Instead, the chronograph is operated entirely through a single pusher integrated into the crown, controlling the start, stop and reset functions. It remains one of the most elegant ways of incorporating a chronograph into a shaped watch.
The dial is equally distinctive. A silvered guilloché centre is surrounded by a blue minute track, with an oversized Roman XII at 12 o'clock and two recessed registers arranged horizontally across the dial. Blued Breguet-style hands and the blue "Cartier Paris" signature provide just enough colour against the white gold case, while the two-register layout preserves the symmetry that is so important to the Tortue's design.
As beautiful as the watch is externally, much of what makes the Tortue Monopoussoir so important is found underneath. Powering it is the manually-wound Calibre 045MC, developed by THA Èbauche, the movement manufacture established by three names that would become extraordinarily important to independent watchmaking: François-Paul Journe, Vianney Halter and Denis Flageollet, who would later co-found De Bethune.
The movement is also mechanically interesting in its own right. Its lateral clutch uses an unusual double swivel-pin system designed to eliminate the characteristic jump of the chronograph seconds hand when the mechanism is engaged, allowing it to begin its journey across the dial more smoothly. Visible through the sapphire caseback, the architecture makes the 045MC as much a part of the appeal of the watch as its association with the three watchmakers responsible for developing it.
For me, the Tortue Monopoussoir 2396 represents CPCP at its very best. It takes one of Cartier's great historical case designs and combines it with a genuinely interesting complication and a movement developed by three of the most important names in modern independent watchmaking.
