Daniel Roth: A Retrospective

Now 76 years old, Roth, like many of his peers, started out as an employee of a mainstream watch brand before he found his feet as an independent watchmaker. The difference, however, is that he did it twice over, dispelling the fantasy that the road is clean-cut for every great watchmaker. Alongside Franck Muller, Roger Dubuis and Philippe Dufour, Roth belonged to the generation of watchmakers who came of age during the Quartz crisis. The precursory role he played in sustaining the craft of watchmaking would parallel the labours of those who maintained the commercial viability of the mechanical watch years later. Particularly, he was directly responsible for the rebirth of one of horology’s greatest names – Breguet – and by extension, established the archetype of the complicated dress watch. Over the course of 14 years at the brand, he created an artistic vocabulary that united modern Breguet wristwatches with the monumental work of history’s finest watchmaker. And evidently in what follows, the path he established for Breguet was also one that would guide him all his life.

While Roth was born in Nice, on the French Riviera in 1946, his family is of Swiss origins. Both his grandfather and great grandfather were watchmakers in Neuchâtel before his grandfather traded the snowy slopes of the Jura for the silky sands of the Mediterranean coast, moving the family to the south of France. Against this unlikely backdrop, he opened a watch repair shop where Roth spent most of his early childhood and served as an apprentice. After completing a three-year watchmaking course in Nice, Roth made his way back to Switzerland in 1967 and settled in the splendid isolation of the Vallée de Joux, the cradle of Swiss watchmaking.

He worked briefly for Jaeger-LeCoultre in Le Sentier, then a supplier of especially flat movements before landing a prized position at Audemars Piguet where he spent seven years. During his time there, he stood out for his mechanical aptitude despite his young age and for being the only watchmaker who didn’t come from Le Brassus, the brand’s historic home. But the defining period of Roth’s career began just as mechanical watchmaking came under the executioner’s blade.

Back then, Breguet was no more than the faintest shadow of its legendary founder – a moribund company with a small boutique in Paris producing around a hundred watches a year. It was owned by George Brown, the grandson of an English watchmaker who had acquired the business from the last living descendent of Abraham-Louis Breguet, Louis-François-Clement after the latter had found much success in the field of electronics and telegraph instruments. After a century under the stewardship of the Brown family, George sold the business to Chaumet in 1970.