Background
Garat was born at Bayonne on the 8th of September 1749.
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Garat was born at Bayonne on the 8th of September 1749.
After receiving a good education under the direction of a relation who was a cure, and having been an advocate at Bordeaux, he came to Paris, where he obtained introductions to the most distinguished writers of the time, and became a contributor to the Encyclopedic methodique and the Mercure de France.
Elected as a deputy to the Estates-General in 1789, Garat rendered important service to the popular cause by his narrative of the proceedings of the Assembly, in the Journal de Paris. In 1793 Garat became minister of the interior, in which position he proved quite inefficient. Though himself uncorrupt, he overlooked the most scandalous corruption in his subordinates, and in spite of a detective service which kept him accurately informed of every movement in the capital, he failed to maintain order.
At last, disgusted with the excesses which he had been unable to control, he resigned on 15 August 1793. On 2 October he was arrested for Girondist sympathies but soon released, and he escaped further molestation owing to the friendship of Barras and, more especially, of Robespierre. On the 9th Thermidor, however, he took sides against Robespierre, and on 12 September 1794 he was named by the Convention as a member of the executive committee of public instruction.
He was elected along with his brother Dominique, dubbed the Old, to be representative of Labourd (Biltzar or Assembly of Ustaritz) in Paris for the third estate on the strength of certain diplomatic gains achieved for Labourd before King Louis XVI. When French Revolution broke out in Paris, both brothers attended the last Third Estate session turned into National Assembly (1790). He was confronted with traumatic decisions regarding a makeover of the institutional reality in Labourd. Up to that point the Basque province was ruled according to its native, foral system. Like the other Basque representatives, he was overwhelmed by the clean sweep proposal for all French administrations, but eventually voted in favour persuaded that it could give him and other Basque representatives a say in future institutional decisions. He was bitterly criticized and even disenfranchised back by the Assembly of Ustaritz for his vote.
In 1790 and 1791, Joseph delivered outstanding addresses in the National Assembly defending before a hostile audience the Basque particularism and a Basque department. Despite his oratory skills that drew Napoleon Bonaparte's attention, the assembly passed a new French institutional design for France with a complete disregard to different institutional make-ups or identities, including the Assembly of Labourd (the Biltzar), whose democratic nature Garat defended.
On 5 February 1809, after a plot was discovered to overthrow Bonaparte, Garat was summoned to his presence after the senator's delivery of a speech fraught with flattery to him. Dominique Joseph Garat was actually involved in the conspiracy, but he was not detained, he was required to retreat back into his home town of Ustaritz. The project of New Phoenicia was stalled, but as war events in Spain wore on the French Emperor opted for the attachment of all territories between the river Ebro and the Pyrenees to France (1810), divided into Catalonia, Aragon, Navarre, and Biscay. Any institutional alterations to these districts were ultimately overridden by military concerns on the ground.
After Garat's failure to progress in politics, he showed a deep concern in defending his determined effort to save Basque institutions and identity at all times, going on to write an essay published posthumously in 1869 with a summary of his views on the origins of the Basques, the Origines des Basques de France et d'Espagne.
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