French Morbier Clocks

Morbier Clocks have been produced between 1680 − 1914 (beginning of World War 1) mainly in the Franche-Comté, which is close to the Swiss border. During strong years in the 1860s more than 50,000 clocks have been manufactured in a single year. Although a few million clocks must have existed, it is extremely difficult to find two identical ones these days. There are multiple reasons for the huge diversity of the remaining antique Morbier clocks:

  1. Its appearance has changed quite dramatically from its early days till the end of production in the beginning of the 20th century. This was driven by a smooth change in production processes and through the availability of materials for dials, frames, hands, pendulums and weights. At every point in time a huge variety of designs has been offered for the different elements forming the face of the clock. On enamel dials many different signatures can be found, mainly indicating name and town of the clock dealers.
  2. A set of common complications have been available for Morbier clocks, like alarm, date indication, multiple bells for the quarter strike, a one month running period and in the late 19th century also a gong. Besides clocks with just one complication, there are clocks with a combination of complications available.
  3. Rare complications were only built based on customer orders, like indication of the weekday, phase of the moon, carillon on bells and other musical mechanisms. Due to the significant higher price only very few clocks have been produced with these complications.
  4. The production process being based mainly on home work also contributed to the spread of different looking Morbier clocks. In particular clocks from the 18th century show big differences in implementation and decoration of the movements, as only very few parts have been pre-manufactured centrally.
  5. The Morbier clock has been targeted at the working population, mainly farmers in rural areas. It has been THE tool to divide the day and coordinate the comings together of the family. No wonder, that a broken Morbier clock with its heavy iron movement has been returned to an iron dealer for recycling, pretty much like any other used up iron tool. Based on vague estimates only about 300,000 clocks survived and are now distributed amongst antique clock collectors around the world.

The enormous amount of variations found with Morbier clocks based on almost endless combinations of different designs, complications and signatures made us start talking about antique UniqueClocks.
The proven robustness of the movement and the well aligned manufacturing process led to the production of a smaller spring driven version of the iron movement. These can be found in bracket clocks and wall clocks with wooden frames (cp. book from G. Schmitt: Die Morez Uhr). Some of the typical Morbier clock features, like the repetition of the hour strike 2 minutes after the full hour, are rarely seen in other French clocks, like in regulator clocks.

The Morbier clocks presented on these WEB pages can only give an overview of these long-living UniqueClocks. It is focusing on clocks with complications.