The New Phoenicia, the first nationalist project. The analysis of J. D. Garat's New Phoenicia project reveals an attempt to adapt the Basque-Cantabrian myth or theory, an exponent of historicist legitimism if ever there was one, to nineteenth-century liberal nationalism. Under his pen, the "cantabrification" of the Basque Country of France carried out by the Chevalier Bela and Bishop Sanadon in their Essai of 1785 was thus culminated. Garat's writings acknowledge not only his predecessors - Oihenart, Moret, Larramendi, Sanadon - but also his contemporaries Moguel and Astarloa. Nor should we forget that in 1801 he met W. Humboldt, the patriarch of scientific Basque-Iberianism. We do not think it would be far-fetched to think that he also met Juan Antonio Zamacola, exiled in France following the "zamacolada" of 1804, and author of a History of the Basque nations published in 1818, after the fall of Napoleon, to whom, however, he seems to allude when he refers to a "confederation of the Basque countries with the Empire of the West". This incipient nationalism disappeared when the old order was re-established in Europe under the dictates of the Holy Alliance. The return of the Fueros, although much diminished, and the birth of fuerismo as an ambiguous doctrine, unionist and separatist at the same time, delayed and even distorted classical nationalism until the end of the 19th century.