Having received merely an elementary education, he learned his father's trade of carpentry, but he gave his spare time to the study of the classics under the direction of the parish priest.

[1] Bouvier was a confidant of Théodore Guérin, who left his diocese in 1840 to go to Indiana and begin the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods.

[2] The influence exerted by his Institutiones Theologicæ (in fifteen editions), which was in use in almost all the seminaries of France, as well as in the United States and Canada, gives Bouvier a position in the history of theology during the nineteenth century.

His compendium had the distinction of being the first manual, and for many years the only one well adapted to that period of transition (1830–70), marked on the one hand by the death struggles of Gallicanism and Jansenism, and on the other by the work of reform undertaken by all departments of ecclesiastical learning.

A Gallican, through prejudices derived from his early training rather than from personal conviction, Bouvier readily consented to submit his work to the corrections of the theologians appointed by Pius IX.

In The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, Edward Westermarck wrote that "[a]s late as the nineteenth century the right of enslaving captives was defended by Bishop Bouvier.