In 2003 F.P. Journe rebuilt the tourbillon, and in doing so moved everything on the dial. This is the watch that came of it: reference TN, calibre 1403, a 40 mm case in 18K 6N gold with a matching dial of 6N gold and whitened guilloche silver, blued steel hands and a sapphire caseback. The hours and minutes sit in a subdial at 3 o'clock, the small seconds at 6, and the power reserve at 12. The movement is hand wound, a tourbillon carrying both a constant force device and a dead seconds, and it runs for 42 hours from twenty turns of the crown. Production ran from 2003 until 2018, fifteen years, which makes this by far the longer-lived of the two generations. It has not been offered since.
What the 1403 gained is easiest to see by listing what it added rather than what it replaced. The earlier calibre already had a remontoire rewound at one-second intervals, and no way at all of showing it. The 1403 takes that same interval and uses it to drive a seconds hand in single steps, so the constant force device stops being an internal argument and becomes a visible one: the hand sits still, jumps, and sits still again, in time with the mechanism that is doing the real work. Adding that display cost height, and the figures show it. The movement went from 6.60 mm to 7.20 mm and from 191 components to 193, while the jewel count actually fell from 28 to 26. The case grew from 38 mm to 40 to carry the extra indication without crowding, and the power reserve moved from 10 to 12 to make room for a seconds subdial at 6. None of those changes is cosmetic and all of them follow from one decision. That is a good description of how this manufacture works generally: a single addition, followed through into every dimension it touches, rather than a redesign undertaken for its own sake. The watch that came out the other side is recognizably the same watch, doing one more thing.
The carriage is the object at the middle of all this and it is worth describing as a thing rather than as a concept. It is a cage, small enough to sit inside a 32.40 mm movement, that carries the entire escapement: the escape wheel, the lever, the balance and its hairspring, and on this watch the remontoire as well. The whole assembly rotates once a minute, driven by the going train, and everything inside it turns with it. Two demands pull directly against each other in its construction, and neither can be given up. It has to be rigid, because any flex changes the geometry of the escapement and the escapement is what keeps time. And it has to be light, because every gram has to be accelerated and decelerated continuously and comes out of the same barrel that runs the watch. The balance itself is free sprung, regulated by four inertia weights set into its rim, with a Breguet overcoil hairspring, and the whole carriage has to be poised about its axis or it will introduce the very positional error it was built to remove. Getting all of that right inside a cage that also has to house a constant force device is the reason this movement took as long to develop as it did.
Journe versions his references by letter rather than by number, and the change from T to TN records this generation exactly. That is a considerably quieter system than most of the industry uses, and it works rather better than it first looks. There is no reference number to decode, no dash and no suffix; there is a short alphabetic code that tells you which movement is inside, and the dial tells you the same thing without any code at all. The practical consequence for a buyer is that a Tourbillon Souverain is never ambiguous at all, once you know what the two dial layouts look like. A reserve at 10 with no seconds subdial means the first generation and the years up to 2003. Reserve at 12 with seconds at 6 means this one, and the years from 2003 to 2018. Fifteen years is a long run for a tourbillon and it says plainly that the redesign worked: the manufacture kept building this watch, essentially unchanged, until it introduced a vertically oriented tourbillon at 42 mm and moved on again. Very few complicated references anywhere run that long without revision, and fewer still stop because something genuinely different has replaced them rather than because they stopped selling.
An all-gold tourbillon shows its wear differently from a platinum one, so the inspection should be adjusted accordingly. Six N gold marks more readily than platinum and shows each polish more clearly, so examine the bezel and the lug flanks for softened edges and treat any rounding as permanent. On the dial, the applied 6N gold elements sit against whitened silver and should be sharp at their edges; raking light will show whether the guilloche has been recut. Confirm the generation from the dial layout and from the 40 mm case, and check the movement through the sapphire back, where solid rose gold plates should be immediately evident rather than any kind of plating. Then wind it fully, twenty turns from empty, and watch the seconds hand for a clean one-second step with no drift or stutter, which is much the fastest way to confirm the remontoire is doing its job. Have the carriage examined by a specialist rather than a general watchmaker, and establish the full service history, since a movement carrying both a tourbillon and a constant force device is not work for a general workshop.
