It is a changed France that Abraham-Louis Breguet discovers when he returns to Paris after the French Revolution. He develops his foreign clientele and it is in Russia where he is the most successful. He opens an establishment in Saint Petersburg in 1808 which he is forced to close three years later when the Tsar Alexander I forbids the entry of French products on Russian ground, as a response to the politics of Napoleon.
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.'