The Paris house is the original operation: the business that Louis-François Cartier founded in 1847 when he took over a small workshop at 29 rue Montorgueil and gradually transformed it into a respected jewellery firm. The Paris salon moved several times as the business grew, arriving at 13 rue de la Paix in the final years of the nineteenth century. That address became the centre of the Cartier world.
It was Louis Cartier, eldest of the three brothers and grandson of the founder, who shaped the Paris house into the creative engine of the firm during the first half of the twentieth century. Working with designers including Charles Jacqueau and Jeanne Toussaint, and with craftsmen such as the clockmaker Maurice Couet and the designer Pierre Lemarchand, and relying on Louis Devaux as his personal secretary and trusted manager, Louis directed a sustained period of innovation. The garland style of the early century gave way to the geometric strictness of Art Deco; the firm's engagement with Indian and Persian visual traditions produced the Tutti Frutti pieces; the mystery clocks established Cartier's reputation in horology; and the fully articulated three-dimensional panther jewels emerged from the Paris workshops in the 1940s and 1950s as some of the most technically demanding objects the firm ever produced.
The Paris house also served the European royal courts and a wide international clientele, and it was in Paris that the firm's relationships with maharajas and Indian princes were developed, though the India connection was primarily driven by Jacques Cartier from London.
During the German occupation in the Second World War, the Paris premises remained open under constrained conditions. Pierre Lemarchand placed a caged bird brooch in the Cartier Paris window in 1942, understood by those who saw it as a comment on the occupation. The story is told in detail in Cartier Paris and the Trapped Bird Brooch.
The formal legal entity for the Paris operation is Cartier SA (Société Anonyme).
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019)
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), pp. 39, 118 et al.
