[1] Born in Córdoba, in what was then the Governorate of the Río de la Plata (a part of the Spanish Empire), Gregorio Funes was raised in privileged circumstances, and enrolled at the College of Monserrat.

Established the Departments of Mathematics, Experimental Physics, French Language studies, Music Theory, and Trigonometry, as well as donating a part of his family estate for curricular expansion.

Funes himself urged the army to return the captured leaders alive, though these were ultimately executed en route to Buenos Aires.

The inclusion of representatives from the hinterland to the government was not unanimously supported, however, and Funes attempted to placate tensions by proposing a system of provincial juntas.

The decree, enacted on February 11, 1811, also provided for the establishment of local juntas, and became the first form of federal government in Argentina, as well as the guarantor of continued political unity during the Argentine War of Independence.

This decree, the first legal code in the fledgling nation's history, was nullified by the Triumvirate's First Secretary, Bernardino Rivadavia, however, who refused to offer or accept concessions to the now powerless Junta.

The congress provoked a revolt late in the year by League of the Free Peoples supporter José Gervasio Artigas, and Funes accepted an appointment by Supreme Director Juan Martín de Pueyrredón as Governor of Córdoba.

Unitarian forces were defeated at the Battle of Cepeda of 1820, and Funes served as the national government's envoy to negotiate the February 23 Treaty of Pilar, upon which the constitution was rescinded.

One of his friends, Santiago Spencer Wilde, invited the cleric for a tour of his recently inaugurated Parque Argentino, the first public garden in Buenos Aires; as they walked in the hot southern hemisphere summer, Dean Gregorio Funes collapsed, and died at age 79.