The Cartier Tortue Monopoussoir, Collection Privée Cartier Paris
Although the Collection Privée Cartier Paris (CPCP) watches were produced for a relatively short period of time, from 1998 to 2008, the watches loom large in Cartier’s history for serious collectors. CPCP became the precursor to Cartier’s current strategy of producing, in small numbers, new versions of some of its most important watches. In the current Privée collection, Cartier brought back classics including the Tank Chinoise, the Asymétrique and the Cloche. From the original CPCP collection, Cartier launched new versions of such iconic watches as the Tank à Guichets and the Tank Cintrée — and it also produced a new version of one of its rarest and most collectible watches, the Tortue Monopoussoir (Monopusher) chronograph.
The Tortue case was one of Cartier’s earliest watch case designs. The name means “Tortoise” and the Tortue case does indeed resemble a highly-stylized tortoise shell. Cartier launched the Tortue in 1912, by which time it had already introduced the Santos-Dumont and Tonneau designs. The Tortue Monopusher came along much later though; various sources say it was 1928 or 1929, although Phillips offered an original from the early 20th century, and according to the auction notes, it was 1927. That lot went on the block in 2021 and hammered for CHF 189,000.
The appearance of any original Tortue monopusher at auction is extremely rare, and one wonders what the watch would have sold for if offered today, when interest in vintage Cartier is at an all-time high. In addition to the Tortue monopusher, Cartier also produced a Tank monopusher chronograph in 1935, but the Tortue is probably the one you’re aware of, if you’re aware of vintage Cartier monopusher chronographs at all.
The monopusher design is, as they say, just what it says on the tin: a chronograph in which the start, stop, and reset-to-zero functions are all handled through a single pusher. In the case of the Tortue Monopoussoir, the crown functions as the chronograph actuator (there are monopusher designs in which the pusher is on the same axis as the crown but in the Tortue, the crown itself is the pusher).
The Tortue Monopoussoir is an extremely elegant take on the chronograph complication, with no extra external pushers to break up the silhouette, though at the time it debuted, the modern two pusher chronograph, with one pusher for start, stop, and restart, and a second for reset-to-zero, was still in the future. Leon Breitling registered the first patent for a two-pusher chronograph in 1923, with the reset pusher on the same axis as the crown, but the modern version with one pusher at 2 o’clock and one at 4 o’clock wasn’t patented — again, by Breitling — until 1934.
The CPCP Tortue Monopoussoir chronograph was launched as part of the debut of the Privée Collection in 1999, but there is an earlier chapter to the story involving three of independent watchmaking’s biggest names. In 1989, three pioneering independent watchmakers formed a new company whose purpose was to create its own watches, and to supply high-end movement solutions to the industry. The company was Techniques Horlogeres Appliques, and the founders were Denis Flageollet, Vianney Halter and François-Paul Journe. One of the company’s clients was Cartier, and one of the movements produced by THA was the Cartier caliber 045MC — a tilting-pinion chronograph movement which powered the CPCP Tortue Monopoussoir.
“François-Paul had his workshop in Paris, we had met a few times, and he wanted to develop a business of haute horlogerie in Switzerland,” Flageollet remarked in an interview with Phillips’ Arthur Touchot. “He contacted me to set up the workshops and technical support. Vianney joined us later, I don’t recall him working on the chrono-monopoussoir, I believe he had left THA beforehand. But in any case, we were young, we had no doubts and we created incredible objects together that would be difficult to make today.
“We had actually already worked for Cartier, we had made many mysterious clocks and watches. At the time the heads of product did not have extensive knowledge of their heritage. We gave them the idea to remake the chrono-monopoussoir Tortue… the movement is relatively simple, it didn’t pose any particular problems, it just took a little time to adapt to achieving the calibers that corresponded to Cartier’s watchmaking standards. The biggest difficulty was to get Cartier’s technicians to understand that they had to have less security on the casing to match the spirit of the original watch and avoid creating a monster!”
The CPCP Tortue was certainly not a monster, although it was larger than the original; at launch, 45mm x 35mm, compared to 35mm x 26mm for the model from the 1920s. The Tortue case is not as elegantly diminutive as some of the Tanks or the smaller Santos models, but the CPCP version’s much more in line with modern tastes.
The monopusher chronograph is, I suppose, obsolete from a technical standpoint — it’s undoubtedly an advance to be able to use one pusher for starting and stopping and a second for resetting. But there is an elegance to the monopusher design which no two-pusher chronograph can quite equal, if you ask me. This is not to say there aren’t very beautiful and very elegant two pusher chronographs; even a cursory glance at Patek’s history will reveal many, but the monopusher chronograph’s clean lines are hard to beat. In the case of this particular watch, you get something extra. The white gold case is set with brilliant-cut round diamonds, and on the lugs as well, giving the watch even more of a Roaring Twenties sense of opulent and assured luxury.
The chronograph for many of us is primarily a technical complication, and with good reason. Over its history it has been used in everything from motorsports to air navigation, to timing for crewed space missions, and it’s synonymous as a complication with technically oriented companies like Omega and Breitling. The Cartier Tortue Monopoussoir has some interesting connections to technical watchmaking as well, through THA, but it ultimately succeeds as an exercise in something at which Cartier has excelled for over a century: an aristocratic and elegant combination of aesthetics and mechanics.