The outbreak of war in August 1914 interrupted the Belle Époque world in which Cartier had built its position. The social structures that had sustained demand for jewellery at the highest level, the court seasons, the aristocratic round of events between London, Paris, and the great houses of Europe, collapsed or contracted sharply. Craftsmen across the firm's workshops were called up. Clients redirected their resources. The conditions that had made the garland-style tiara the central commission of a decade disappeared almost overnight.
The three branches responded differently to the same pressure. Cartier Paris under Louis Cartier continued to operate but at reduced scale, with many of the skilled craftsmen who had produced its most demanding pieces now absent. Cartier London remained open through the war, serving a clientele that included military officers and their families as well as those who continued to require jewellery despite the war's conditions. Cartier New York was the least directly affected, the United States not entering the war until 1917, and Pierre Cartier's American business continued to develop during the years when the European branches were most constrained.
The most lasting creative consequence of the war was the Cartier Tank. Louis Cartier's rectangular wristwatch, whose form was inspired by the overhead view of the new armoured tanks that had appeared on the Western Front, was designed in 1917. The connection between the watch's profile and the parallel tracks of a tank, the tracks becoming the bracelet, the body of the watch becoming the chassis, was explicit in Louis Cartier's thinking. The Tank was first produced as a gift and entered regular production after the war, becoming one of the most imitated watch designs of the twentieth century.
Louis Cartier's most prestigious war commission came in July 1918, when Cartier was asked to design a commemorative field marshal's baton for Ferdinand Foch, who was promoted Marshal of France the following month. The result was described at the time as "a work of art destined to become a historical object." It is now held at the Musée de l'Armée in Paris, alongside a second baton Cartier made for Marshal Philippe Pétain. The photograph above shows Foch at the Bastille Day victory parade of 14 July 1919, saluting the crowd with his baton on horseback.
The war also accelerated a change already underway: the shift from the pocket watch to the wristwatch as the standard timepiece for men of standing. Officers in the field required a watch they could consult without reaching into a pocket, and the wristwatch became associated with modernity and practicality in ways it had not been before 1914.
The social world that emerged from the war was different from the one that had entered it. Many of the European aristocratic families that had been Cartier's core clients had lost wealth, male heirs, or both. New money, American clients, and a more international, less court-centred clientele became increasingly important to the firm in the years following the Armistice.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), chs. 4–5
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), pp. 88, 89 et al.
- Agence de presse Meurisse / Bibliothèque nationale de France, photograph of Marshal Foch at the Bastille Day parade, 14 July 1919 (public domain)
- Wikipedia: World War I and Cartier
