One watch, made once, sold in a room in Geneva on the twelfth of May 2015. F.P. Journe built this Tourbillon Souverain as a single piece for Action Innocence, the Geneva foundation that works to protect children on the internet, and everything it raised went to the foundation. The case is platinum at 40 mm and 9.9 mm tall. The dial carries the colors of Action Innocence alongside whitened guilloche silver. Inside is the calibre 1403, hand wound, with a tourbillon, a constant force device and a dead beat seconds. Hours and minutes sit at 3 o'clock, the seconds at 6, and the power reserve at 12. There is no second example of it anywhere. It was built for a single evening and it has existed as one object ever since.
The constant force device is the reason this movement is difficult, and it is worth being clear about what it actually does. A mainspring delivers more torque when it is fully wound than when it has nearly run down, and that varying force reaches the escapement and changes how the balance behaves across the length of a wind. Most of watchmaking accepts the variation and compensates for it somewhere else. Journe instead inserted a remontoire d'egalite between the barrel and the escapement: a small secondary spring that is rewound at a fixed interval by the going train, and that delivers the same force to the escapement on every release regardless of the state of the mainspring behind it. The escapement therefore never sees the barrel at all. It sees only the remontoire, and the remontoire is always the same. The interval is fixed by the mechanism rather than by the wearer, so the escapement receives an identical impulse whether the watch was wound that morning or two days earlier. Building that into a tourbillon carriage, which is already rotating and already carrying the escapement and the balance, is the hard part, because every component has to be light enough to turn and rigid enough to hold its geometry while turning. The movement comes to 193 components across 26 jewels, with plates and bridges in 18K rose gold.
The dead beat seconds follows directly from the remontoire and is the part you can actually watch. Because the secondary spring is rewound once each second, the mechanism has a natural one-second beat available to it, and Journe used that beat to drive the seconds hand in single steps rather than in the small increments a 3 Hz escapement would otherwise produce. The hand sits still, jumps, and sits still again. It is a quartz-like motion arrived at by entirely mechanical means, and on a tourbillon it is genuinely rare, since the two mechanisms are usually kept well apart from one another. The dial layout puts all of that on display. Hours and minutes occupy a subdial at 3 o'clock rather than the middle of the face, the seconds sit at 6, and the power reserve reads at 12, which leaves the remaining space to the tourbillon carriage and gives the dial its asymmetry. Watch it for long enough and the carriage and the seconds hand fall into an obvious relationship with one another, the one turning continuously and the other advancing in fixed steps, both of them driven from the same place. Journe has used that arrangement on the Tourbillon Souverain since 2003. Nothing about it is decorative. Each indication is where it is because the movement beneath put it there, and the carriage needed the room.
Action Innocence was founded in Geneva in 1999 by Valerie Wertheimer and works to protect the dignity and integrity of children on the internet. Journe has supported it for a long time and in a particular way: rather than writing a check, he builds a watch that does not otherwise exist, gives it to the foundation, and lets the room decide what it is worth. He did that with this Tourbillon Souverain and with an Elegante in titanium in 2015, with a Chronometre Optimum in 2017, and with an Automatique at a gala in Gstaad in 2023. The watches are linked by their dials, which carry the foundation's purple, and by the fact that each one is the only example of itself. The 2015 gala marked the foundation's fifteenth year, which is why two watches went to it that evening rather than one, and no design has been repeated across any of them. All of the proceeds go to the foundation. That produces an unusual category within the marque: watches that are genuinely unique, that were never catalogued or offered to anybody in the ordinary way, and whose existence is a matter of public record because the gala that sold them was itself public. Very few unique pieces anywhere carry that kind of documentation from the moment they were made.
Anybody looking at this watch is looking at a documented one-off rather than at a rare production reference, and the two things are bought differently. The paperwork here is as much the asset as the watch is: the gala catalogue, the foundation's own record and the certificate should agree with one another and with the dial in front of you. Confirm the dial is the original Action Innocence execution and has not been refinished, since there is no reference specification to check it against beyond the foundation's own images. Wind it fully and watch the seconds hand for a clean one-second step with no drift or stutter, which is the fastest way to establish that the remontoire is doing its work. Check that the indication at 12 falls back across roughly forty-two hours rather than stopping short of the end. Condition on a watch that has spent most of its life inside one collection is usually good, but it should still be established rather than assumed. Then have the carriage examined properly, because a constant force device inside a rotating cage is not a mechanism to take on trust.
