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Joseph Gérard was born on 12 March 1831 in Boux-sous-Salmaise, in the Côte-d'Or department of Burgundy in eastern France. He grew up in a rural Catholic farming household and discerned a vocation both to the priesthood and to missionary life. He entered the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the congregation founded by Eugène de Mazenod for missions among the poor, made religious profession in the early 1850s, and was ordained a priest in 1853 by de Mazenod himself. Within months he was assigned to the Oblate missions in southern Africa and reached the British colony of Natal in 1854.

In Natal, Gérard was stationed at various posts and worked among the Zulu, an apostolate that met linguistic, cultural, and political obstacles and yielded few conversions in those years. In 1862 Bishop Jean-François Allard, the Oblate vicar apostolic, led a small party that included Gérard into Basutoland, the mountain kingdom of the Basotho (today Lesotho). They were received by King Moshoeshoe I, who permitted them to settle. Gérard took a leading part in founding the mission station that came to be called Roma (Motse-oa-'M'a-Jesu), southeast of the later capital Maseru. From that base he evangelized surrounding districts, often traveling on horseback over difficult highland paths, learned Sesotho, instructed catechumens, and administered the sacraments.

Over the following decades Gérard became closely identified with the Basotho. He also spent periods serving Basotho communities west of the Caledon River in the Orange Free State. He endured the disruptions of regional conflict in the later nineteenth century, including wars that affected Basutoland, while remaining at his post. Though the Catholic community grew only slowly and remained a minority, the foundations he helped lay contributed to the later development of the Catholic Church in Lesotho. Contemporaries remembered him for personal austerity, patience, humility, and perseverance rather than for dramatic success.

Gérard died at the Roma mission on 29 May 1914, after some sixty years in southern Africa and more than fifty years in Lesotho, and was buried there. A reputation for holiness attached to his memory among the Basotho and the Oblates, and a beatification cause was introduced. On 15 September 1988, during an apostolic visit to southern Africa, Pope John Paul II beatified him at an open-air Mass in Maseru, Lesotho. His liturgical memorial is observed on 29 May. He has not been canonized.

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