Some watches are made to be worn every day. Others are made to change the world, or at least raise a bit of money to help protect it. This week in Monaco, François-Paul Journe unveiled the second kind: a one-of-a-kind chronograph created for the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, presented alongside the Sovereign Prince himself at the Yacht Club de Monaco.
Here’s what makes this piece genuinely interesting beyond the good cause. Journe has built rattrapante chronographs, flyback chronographs, and the wonderfully odd Centigraphe. But a classic chronograph, the simple stop-start kind most brands make first? This is his first one. Sometimes the most straightforward complication takes the longest to get around to.
The layout is clean and legible: a central chronograph hand, a 30-minute counter at 3 o’clock, small seconds at 9, and a big date window down at 6. Around the edge runs a tachymeter scale, in case you ever need to calculate your speed while wearing a platinum watch, which admittedly does not happen often.
The case mixes platinum with 18K rose gold for the band, crown, and pushers, a combination that gives the 42mm piece some visual depth without shouting about it. Flip it over and you’ll find “Fondation Albert II – 2026” engraved on the caseback, a nice permanent reminder of why this watch exists.
The dial is where things get poetic. It’s lacquered in a deep burgundy, with numerals inspired by oracle bone script, which is basically the oldest form of Chinese writing we know of, carved onto turtle shells and animal bones thousands of years ago. It’s a lovely touch, connecting one of humanity’s earliest attempts to record time and language with a mechanism built to measure it down to a fraction of a second. The counters get grey sapphire with titanium surrounds, and the hands are rhodium-plated steel finished in ivory and red lacquer. Inside sits the manually wound Calibre 1518.3, offering a solid 80 hours of power reserve, which is more stamina than most people have after a gala dinner.
And speaking of gala dinners: this watch won’t be sold in a boutique. It’s headed to Phillips for auction on 25 November 2026, during the “Voyage Extraordinaire” dinner at Raffles Sentosa Singapore, marking the Foundation’s 20th anniversary. Every cent from the sale goes toward the Foundation’s work on climate, biodiversity, water resources, and desertification across the Mediterranean, the Polar Regions, and the world’s least developed countries.
Journe has backed this cause since 2018, and pieces like this show why that kind of partnership works. The watch does its job as a timepiece, and then it does another job entirely: turning craftsmanship into conservation funding. Not bad for a first classic chronograph.
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