(646) 220-7487 Sell Your Watch → Home / Encyclopedia / Cartier / Cartier Tortue Buying Guide: CPCP Monopoussoir, References, Prices | Ultimate Watch Cartier Tortue Buying Guide: CPCP Monopoussoir, References, Prices | Ultimate Watch The Cartier Tortue is the tortoise. Louis Cartier drew it in 1912 as the third shaped case the house ever put on a wrist, after the Santos-Dumont of 1904 and the Tonneau of 1906. The name is French for tortoise, and the reference is literal: soft rounded flanks, a case that swells at the middle and tapers toward short lugs, a shape you read as a shell the moment you see it top-down. It arrived when the wristwatch was still winning its argument against the pocket watch, and it made that argument in the language of form rather than utility. We handle Cartier shaped watches every week at our counter on 47th Street, and the Tortue is the one that separates the people who like Cartier from the people who collect it. It never sold in Tank or Santos numbers. That is exactly why the good ones are worth talking about.
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Collector's Lore The story collectors trade at dinner is the THA connection. When Cartier needed a movement worthy of the 1999 CPCP Tortue Monopoussoir, it turned to Techniques Horlogeres Appliquees, the small atelier run by Denis Flageollet, Vianney Halter, and Francois-Paul Journe, three names that would each go on to build celebrated independent brands. That a Cartier chronograph carries fingerprints from that group is the kind of footnote that turns a well-dressed watch into a genuine collector's piece, and for years the market undervalued it precisely because most buyers did not know. The second piece of lore is the century-long loop: Cartier first built a Tortue single-button chronograph in 1928, and it took until 2024 for the house to build an all-new in-line Monopoussoir movement, the Caliber 1928 MC, named for that founding year. The tortoise moves slowly, which the watch community has never let anyone forget, but the shape has outlasted nearly every round watch of its generation. That is the whole argument for the Tortue in one sentence.
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