Born in the southeastern French city of Grenoble in 1653 to a wealthy land owning family, St. Vallier swiftly became a community figure, known for founding a hospital.

The La Croixs owned a large amount of land including the castle of Saint-Vallier in the Rhone, which previously belonged to King Henry II's mistress, Diane de Poitiers.

He was a close friend of the bishop of Grenoble, Le Camus, and would regularly visit hospitals, prisons and country parishes.

Many of these missions (Illinois, Louisiana, and Mississippi) resulted in conflicts between Bishop Saint-Vallier, the Jesuits and the seminary of Quebec.

His various construction projects reflect a desire to restore and renew the authority in the Catholic Church as the main institution of administrative organization.

It included the whole of French North America, or what was called New France, divided in seven colonies: Newfoundland, Acadia, Île Royale, Louisiana, Illinois, Upper Country and Canada,[4] inhabited by Indigenous people and the European settlers.

The arrival of Saint-Vallier and his strong views on what should be the duties of the priests created a shock wave in the orders, especially for the Seminary of Quebec, newly founded by his predecessor Bishop Laval.

Advancing quickly in the religious and social hierarchies, it was but a matter of time before Saint-Vallier would be elevated to the rank of bishop.

In 1685, Mgr de Laval, Bishop of Quebec, gave his resignation to the King and proposed Saint-Vallier to replace him.

[1] Abbot Saint-Vallier finally decided to accept the position, and left France for a sojourn in his future see with the title of vicar general of Bishop Laval, since the ceremony of his investiture had to be postponed due to the difficult relationship between the Pope Innocent XI and Louis XIV.

The superiors of the seminary later wrote to Bishop Laval that they believed he wasn't a suitable candidate for the task of governing the Quebec diocese.

Disappointed and angry, as he had expected to die at the Quebec church he had co-founded, Laval made many accusations that portrayed Saint-Vallier as a manipulative traitor.

"Mgr de Saint-Vallier worked on establishing more strict and clear pastoral norms […] the directives that he fixed throughout his episcopate concentrate mainly on the administration of the sacraments, especially the sacrament of penitence, and on the preaching"[7] At that time, the Iroquois started attacking the French again and the impending approach of the English loomed ahead.

Attacked on every side and called a tyrant and a jansenist, he decided to seek for arbitration by higher religious authorities, in this case the Archbishop of Paris and the private confessor of the King, who "both decided in favour of the bishop on the essential points […], the seminary of Quebec lost its privileges and came [back] under the usual rule.

Saint-Vallier's tenure as bishop was defined by interminable quarrels with governmental and religious institutions in French North America.

Even before he was officially consecrated as bishop, Saint-Vallier's active leadership style brought him into conflict with various groups, who perceived him as, at times, domineering and micromanaging.

The Critic Dictionary of Theology explain the large meaning of Jansenism thus: "designated an intern movement of Catholicism that refutes the necessity of certain condemnations and limits their range, and tries to present Christianity in its original form and closer to its objectives"[12] Opposed to the centralization of power and the absolutism, this religious movement was seen as a plague by the court of King Louis XIV and in New France, where the government system was strongly based on absolutism.

Because of his quarrels with the Jesuits, the Superior of the order decided to attack Saint-Vallier's authority by writing a long critic of those three books seeing them as a "lapse into Arianism, Pelagianism, Jansenism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism".

They encountered much reluctance from the population, especially with the Natives, who were in disagreement with the clergy's fight against alcoholism, ‘indecency and immorality’ and their attempt to instill Christian practices into the tribes while ridding them of their own set of customs.

The dispute over the sale of alcohol also created waves in the colonial population since the government and especially the merchants sought to use spirits as a way to maintain good relations with the Amerindian tribes.

Many people were happy to be rid of Saint-Vallier and his incessant disputes, and the Queen of England demanded in exchange for the Bishop of Quebec the return of the Baron de Méan, "a dangerous man for France’s interests".

After thirteen years of absence, Saint-Vallier finally returned to Quebec, having persuaded the king to give consent to his departure.

The disputes with the religious orders of New France, the government and the merchants gave way to a more peaceful period that lasted until his death, although he retained some of his old habits.

He refused, for example, to ring the bell of the cathedral for the death of the governor Rigaud de Vaudreuil and "grudges subsisted between [him] and his seminary".

[1] The Abbot Gosselin who wrote about the Bishop Saint-Vallier in the late 19th century said of him: "especially by his great virtues and the holiness of his life, he is revealed in history with the halo of charity and disinterest: his memory shall be eternal" (surtout par ses grandes vertus [...] et la sainteté de sa vie, [...] il nous apparaît dans l’histoire avec l’auréole de la charité et du désintéressement : sa mémoire sera immortelle)[2]