Should Professionals in the Watch Industry Know French?
Image: Patek Philippe
Mitch Barber at The Subdial recently published a piece arguing that watch journalists specifically should learn French. He is right. But the argument he is making is far too narrow, and I say that with complete respect for the honesty and sincerity with which he made it. The problem of operating in the watch industry without French is not a journalism problem. It’s not even a media problem. It’s an industry-wide problem that touches every retailer who has ever fumbled through a brand presentation, every collector who has ever taken a press kit at face value, every marketing director who has ever written copy about a movement they fundamentally do not understand, and every brand ambassador who has ever stood next to a watchmaker at an event and smiled pleasantly through a conversation they could not follow. It’s the operating system the whole enterprise runs on, and almost nobody outside Switzerland and France is running it. French is not just a nice-to-have for people in the watch industry.
The geography makes this argument before any philosophy needs to be deployed. For more than a century, over 90% of Swiss watch production has been concentrated in the Arc Horloger, the crescent of Jura cantons running along Switzerland's northwestern border, according to Switzerland Tourism. That arc includes Neuchâtel, Geneva, Vaud, the Bernese Jura, and the Canton of Jura. Every single one of those territories is either fully Francophone or conducts the working life of its watchmaking industry in French. Neuchâtel is the historical and intellectual heartland of Swiss watchmaking, producing the philosophical and technical foundations on which the modern industry rests, and Neuchâtel is a French-speaking canton. The Vallée de Joux, home to Audemars Piguet, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Blancpain, and dozens of specialist suppliers, has been making watches since 1748 and has done so in French for every one of those years. Geneva, where Rolex, Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin, and the independents of the Rive Gauche operate, is a French-speaking city. The language is the medium through which this craft was built, transmitted, and refined across generations.
In 2020, UNESCO formally recognized the craftsmanship of mechanical watchmaking and art mechanics as intangible cultural heritage, in a joint submission by Switzerland and France. France is a co-signatory. The tradition crosses the border because the culture that produced it crosses the border, and the culture that produced it is Francophone on both sides. The entire technical vocabulary of haute horlogerie, every term that appears in a watch review, a GPHG citation, a movement specification, or a brand manifesto, is French in origin and French in precision. Tourbillon is not a translated concept. Remontoir d'égalité is not a phrase that exists in English with equal accuracy. Guilloché, cloisonné, flinqué, poinçon de Genève, these are not decorative French words applied to Swiss objects for marketing texture. They are the native names of specific techniques developed by French-speaking craftsmen in French-speaking workshops, and the English versions of them are approximations at best.
The people responsible for transmitting this knowledge to the next generation understand this in the most practical terms imaginable. The École d'Horlogerie de Genève, and the oldest watchmaking school in Switzerland, operates in French. Its alumni include Christophe Claret, Roger Dubuis, Franck Muller, and Rexhep Rexhepi, a list that represents a significant portion of the most admired independent watchmaking talent of the last thirty years. The Centre Interrégional de Formation des Montagnes Neuchâteloises, the École Technique de la Vallée de Joux, the Centre de Formation Professionnelle Neuchâtelois, all French. The inter-company courses for quality control specialists across French-speaking Switzerland, mentioned in the school's own official documentation, are conducted in French. The knowledge infrastructure of this industry is built in one language, and it’s not English.
The Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève, the industry's most prestigious awards platform and what amounts to the Oscars of watchmaking, operates in French. Its own mission statement on the official website, the sentence that defines its reason for existing, is written in French: ‘Le Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève est destiné à mettre en valeur et saluer annuellement l'excellence des productions horlogères contemporaines.’ The jury convenes behind closed doors in Geneva in the presence of notaries and physically evaluates timepieces before casting votes. The deliberations, the discussions among the thirty jury members as they handle the nominated watches, the conversational layer beneath the formal voting process where opinions are actually formed and arguments are actually made, happen primarily in French. If you are an industry professional who cannot follow that conversation, you are not fully in the room even when you are physically present in it.
This is where the argument moves from practical to philosophical, and where I want to be precise. The case for French in the watch industry is not primarily about access to information. Most substantive information about watches is available in English. You can read technical breakdowns, movement analyses, brand histories, and collector guides in English without much difficulty. The case is about something more fundamental, which is the difference between understanding a craft and understanding about a craft. Understanding about a craft is what you get from translated materials. Understanding a craft is what you get when you can access the thinking of the people inside it in the language that thinking was originally done in.
A year and a half ago, I started learning French more seriously with the help of a teacher. The catalyst was also watching Wei Koh interview Laurent Ferrier. Mr. Ferrier speaks some English but is not comfortable doing so on camera, which means that every journalist who arrives without French is, in practical terms, arriving without access. His ideas about harmony, restraint, and the relationship between motor racing and watchmaking precision were formed in French and live most accurately in French. Every English-language transcript of a Ferrier interview that exists, including the ones where a journalist noted explicitly that the conversation had to be conducted in French and then translated for publication, is already a reduction of the original thought. Wei understood this and arrived prepared to meet Ferrier entirely in his own register, removing the camera discomfort entirely by removing the language barrier entirely. What resulted was a conversation with a texture and a depth that no English-adjacent interview with Ferrier has achieved. Ferrier opened in ways that the translated versions of him simply do not. The camera shyness around English disappeared because it was never asked of him. The person across from him who speaks French does not ask him to perform in a language that makes him self-conscious on record. That difference is not cosmetic.
Philippe Dufour of Vallée de Joux whose Simplicity and Duality have become reference points for an entire generation of collectors and independents, has spoken repeatedly about the importance of transmission in watchmaking. ‘The most important thing is the transmission of knowledge,’ he said in various interviews conducted in his native French and widely circulated in translation. ‘Without transmission, the craft dies.’ Dufour's workshops, his apprentices, his philosophy of finishing and hand-work, all of it transmitted in French, all of it alive most completely in that medium. When you read him in English, you are reading the message after it has been passed through a filter. The filter is good, but it’s not the source.
The industry's commercial layer has adapted to English because the commercial layer had to. Rolex sells watches globally and communicates globally. Patek court collectors in Tokyo, New York, and Dubai and produces materials in English for all of them. The CEOs who appear at Watches and Wonders have all learned to perform their brands in English with considerable skill. The trade press has operated in English for decades and produced intelligent, informative work in that language. None of this changes the underlying reality. The creative and intellectual life of this craft happens in French, and the commercial layer is not where the substance lives. The substance lives in the ateliers, the school workshops, the independent manufactures, the conversations between watchmakers in the Sentier and the finisseurs in the Ateliers de la Côte. That is where the tradition actually resides and that is where French is not a preference but a structural requirement.
For retailers, this matters in a way that is often invisible precisely because the current system functions well enough to obscure the problem. A trained retail consultant in any serious watch boutique can explain a tourbillon, a perpetual calendar, a minute repeater. They can tell you about the history of the Calibre 89 or the significance of the poinçon de Genève. They can do this convincingly and professionally entirely in English. What they cannot do, without French, is access the primary sources of that knowledge. They cannot read the original technical documentation in the language it was written. They cannot call a brand's atelier in Neuchâtel and have a direct conversation with the movement specialist about a service question. They cannot attend a brand training session in Le Brassus and understand the watchmaker's full explanation before it has been softened and simplified for an English-speaking audience. The knowledge they have is real. It has been passed through several layers of translation and summarization before reaching them, and layers do not preserve information perfectly.
For collectors at the upper end of the market, the ones building relationships directly with brands and independents, the gap is even more consequential. The most desirable independent watchmakers in the world, the names that appear on every serious collector's list, Dufour, Voutilainen, Rexhepi, the Grönefeld brothers, De Bethune under Denis Flageollet, these are watchmakers whose creative thinking is rooted in a Francophone tradition and most of whom conduct their deepest professional conversations in French. Accessing them directly, without a translator mediating the relationship, changes the nature of the relationship entirely. The collector who speaks French is in direct contact with the person and the philosophy they are collecting. That is a different kind of collecting.
Mitch’s piece has the honesty of someone who went to a manufacture, stood in front of a craftsman with thirty years of workshop stories, and could not ask him a single question. That moment of frustrated silence is the whole argument made concrete. But the same moment happens every day in this industry in forms that are less visible and therefore easier to ignore. It happens when a marketing team writes a campaign about savoir-faire without being able to define the term in the language in which the concept actually operates. It happens when a retailer advises a customer on a movement architecture he has only ever understood in translation. It happens when a collector reads an English-language account of an independent watchmaker's philosophy and mistakes the summary for the thought.
The argument comes down to a single proposition. French is the operating system of this industry. Everything else, the English press releases, the translated brand histories, the English-language fair coverage, the multilingual CEOs performing fluency for global media, is built on top of that operating system. The operating system is what runs the actual processes. The layer on top of it is what most of the English-speaking watch world has decided to engage with, and it’s possible to spend an entire career in watches doing only that. What is not possible is to claim genuine depth of understanding about a craft while refusing to engage with the language in which that craft thinks.
The goal should always be genuine understanding. In the watch industry as everywhere else, the people who operate from genuine understanding will always outperform the people who operate from summaries. This applies not just to journalists, but also retailers, brand managers and marketing directors, and anyone else who has ever cashed a check from an industry whose essence was written in French.
