The years following the Revolution see the dawn of a new clientele in France: bankers, officers but also the elite that held the power. In parallel, Abraham-Louis Breguet makes a name with the foreign clientele, English, Spanish or Russian in particular. Tsar Alexander I would visit the watchmaker in his workshop at Quai de l’Horloge. Caroline Murat, who became Queen of Naples in 1808, would own nearly thirty-four Breguet timepieces throughout her lifetime.
In 1804, Ali Effendi, then Minister for the Navy, commissioned the finest possible repeating watch for the Ottoman Emperor, Selim III, to whom he referred only – according to Turkish custom – as 'the greatest person in our country… so great and so eminent that I may not utter his name'. The project was a success: the emperor demanded a second watch identical to the first, and Ali Effendi wrote to Breguet the following year: 'Your reputation in Constantinople could not be higher. All the great princes admire your works.'
