I'm looking at four clear stages - the crystal, an oscillator circuit (oc) to fire the crystal up, an inverter (i) of some sort and a divider that looks binary to me followed by an output to, presumably further iterations of the binary circuit. I'm not wading through the description of the operation in French tonight but that looks like a simple overflow setup.

Mind you, my only real experience of this sort of stuff is wading through W Grey Walter's analog neurons for connectionist inspiration decades ago. I'm so far from an expert it isn't funny.