Pierre Roger was born in 1291 at the Château de Maumont in Corrèze to a French Limousin noble family. At the age of 10 (1301), he entered the Benedictine Abbey of La Chaise-Dieu (the Auvergne abbey of St. Robert of Chaise-Dieu) as a child oblate.
Educated at the University of Paris, Pierre Roger became Doctor of Theology and Abbot of Fécamp (1327–1329), then Bishop of Arras (1328), Archbishop of Sens (1329), and Archbishop of Rouen (1330–1338).
On the death of Pope Benedict XII (April 25, 1342), Pierre Roger was elected Pope on May 7, 1342, taking the papal name Clement VI.
Clement VI's ten-year pontificate (1342–1352) coincided with two catastrophic events: the Black Death (1348–1350, the bubonic plague epidemic that killed an estimated one-third to one-half of the European population) and the continuing Hundred Years' War (1337–1453) between France and England.
Clement VI's pastoral response to the Black Death is one of the principal medieval Catholic pastoral-ecclesiastical narratives. During the plague's arrival at Avignon in spring 1348, Clement VI: ordered continuous Masses to be celebrated for the plague victims; personally led papal processions through the Avignon streets with the papal cross; issued the papal bull 'Sicut Judaeis' (1348) protecting the European Jewish population from the plague-blame pogroms that erupted across Christian Europe (over 1,000 Jewish communities attacked during the plague years, producing tens of thousands of Jewish deaths); established the 'Plenary Indulgence for the Plague' for the dying; and personally purchased the sovereignty of the Comtat Venaissin (including Avignon proper, purchased from Queen Joanna I of Naples for 80,000 florins in 1348), institutionally establishing the papal territorial sovereignty at Avignon.
Clement VI undertook the massive expansion of the Palais des Papes (Papal Palace) at Avignon — commissioning the construction of the 'New Palace' (the second and larger portion of the current Palais des Papes, built 1344–1352 under Clement's patronage). The Palais des Papes — the largest Gothic palace in Europe, UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1995 — established the Avignon papal architectural-cultural tradition.
He died at Avignon on December 6, 1352, and was buried at his native Abbey of La Chaise-Dieu, where the late-Gothic abbey-church (built 1344–1352 under his papal patronage) preserves his tomb.