Contrariness can be a wonderful innovator. The greatest romantic novels — Shelley’s Frankenstein, Austen’s best-known bouts of barbed gentility, the Sunday-night screen adaptation fare of Hugo and Tolstoy — always raised a middle finger to the formal austerity of Enlightenment ideals; impressionism was a tetchily daubed reaction to the craven verisimilitude of realism; punk was a rebellion against, well, everything except youthful nihilism. ‘Épater la bourgeoisie’ would have been a pretty insipid rallying cry without bourgeois values for those French Decadent poets to rail against.
When childhood friends Jules Louis Audemars and Edward Auguste Piguet united to form a company that, by the time of its 150th anniversary next year, will have become the
