A lawyer in Saintes in 1784, Jacques Garnier stood out from the beginning of the French Revolution by creating and chairing a committee to acquire wheat stocks and sell them at auction.
Jacques Garnier was verbally violent, demanding that the Convention ban in perpetuity emigres of both genders, punishable by their executions if they return to France; this act, with modification, was known as the Law of Suspects.
[1] His exasperated colleagues dealt with his interminable interruptions and vitriol by sending him on a mission to the army of the coast at La Rochelle in late April 1793, where he enthusiastically pursued those he perceived as enemies of the revolution.
[2] Exiled as a regicide in the Bourbon Restoration, in 1815 he moved with his son Simon to the United States, where he joined the Vine and Olive Colony of Bonapartists.
In January 1817, when the colony moved to Marengo County, Alabama, on a plot established by an act of Congress in 1816, Garnier and his son remained in Kentucky.