F.P. Journe Sonnerie Souveraine Ref. GS Stainless Steel Grey Dial

The Sonnerie Souveraine debuted in 2006 and took the Aiguille d'Or at the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève the same year, the top award of that competition, and was voted Watch of the Year 2006 in Japan. Ten patents were registered for it. It is a grande and petite sonnerie with a minute repeater: in grande sonnerie it strikes the hours and the quarters as they pass without being asked, in petite sonnerie it strikes the hours only, and the repeater sounds the hours, quarters and minutes on demand.

The case is steel, measuring 42 mm across and standing 12.5 mm deep, on a steel bracelet. Steel is the deliberate choice for a striking watch in F.P. Journe's catalogue rather than an economy: its density and structure carry the tone in a way gold and platinum do not, which is the same reasoning behind the steel case of the Répétition Souveraine. The dial is white gold worked against whitened guilloché silver, and the hands are blued steel, so nothing on the outside of the watch announces what is inside it.

The mechanism comprises roughly 408 parts. Among the ten patents is a provision that blocks the strike automatically to keep a reserve for timekeeping, so the watch cannot be left unable to tell the time by an owner who chimes it repeatedly — a failure mode that had limited chiming watches before it.

Only two watchmakers at the manufacture were certified to assemble the Sonnerie Souveraine, which held output to roughly four pieces a year. The reference was discontinued in 2018, and somewhat more than 50 were made across the whole of its production — a figure set by assembly capacity rather than by a declared limited edition, and small even against F.P. Journe's other Souveraine references.

The steel case is the part collectors point to. A grande sonnerie is among the most expensive complications a maker can offer, and F.P. Journe put this one in the least precious metal he uses, for acoustic reasons, on a steel bracelet. The result reads from a distance as a plain 42 mm steel watch on a plain steel bracelet, and resolves into a grande sonnerie only when the strike controls set into the case are noticed.