His father's third marriage (c. 1500) to Isabeau de Popincourt (who brought Roberval's possessions to La Rocques) resulted in the birth of three half-sisters and a half-brother: Marquise, Charlotte, Marie and Jean.

At the end of the war of 1536–1538 he returned from Italy as a hero, but without its leader, Robert De La Marck (died in 1536) and half of his comrades who were killed in fighting with the Spaniards in 1537.

But when this goodwill ceased in the fall of 1540, the French sovereign decided to increase the size of the original expedition and at the same time empty its overcrowded prisons.

This first French colony will therefore include settlers, artisans and soldiers to protect the establishment from Amerindians or Spaniards and to supervise prisoners sentenced to hard labor.

The choice fell on La Rocque de Roberval, who had the advantages of being a noble soldier, leader of a man who will not back down from the enemy, an engineer in fortifications and a master of mines in France, aspects useful for the future colony.

To overcome this problem, La Rocque decided to send Cartier immediately to Canada with more than half of the fleet so that the colonial settlement would be ready when he came to join him.

After a winter, logically in a state of siege and not seeing La Rocque de Roberval coming, the sailor from Saint-Malo decides to pack up his bags with a few barrels filled with stones and minerals that he believes are precious in his holds.

In her Heptaméron, the sister of the King of France, Marguerite of Navarre, reports that on their way to the colony, La Rocque forced a couple to disembark on a small island.

During the long winter, about fifty settlers died of scurvy, a clear sign that neither Cartier nor the Stadaconians had explained to them the recipe for Anneda which could cure this disease.

In September 1544, Charles V decided to sign peace with François I, but two days later the English seized the stronghold of Boulogne-sur-Mer and continued their advance towards the capital.

Those who had not been killed on the battlefields paid the monetary debts they had incurred during the numerous conflicts of the first half of the 16th century, or scrounged to pay the ransom of Francis I while he was detained in Spain.

Roberval was assassinated at the dawn of the French Wars of Religion a month after the Conspiracy of Amboise (March 17, 1560), on the occasion of the burial of a colleague in the Saints-Innocents cemetery in Paris on April 18, 1560.

Despite his military fame and his involvement in the Canadian expedition, La Rocque de Roberval had difficulty entering the Pantheon of 16th-century explorers and colonizers, mainly because of his religious opinions that were anti-clerical and favorable to the Reformation.

His reputation was reduced or even blackened at the time of the religious wars in France (1562–1598) and it was not until the nineteenth century that he emerged again in historiography and after the 1960s that he is mentioned in public historical literature.

According to the dedication to Henry of Navarre by François Desprez, some of the costume woodcuts in Richard Breton's Recueil des Habits (Paris 1562) derive from Roberval's sketches.