After living for many years in France, the wealthy and sophisticated Paul Marchand, a Free Man of Color, returns to his home in New Orleans. He discovers through a will that he is white and now head of a prosperous and influential family. Since mixed-race marriages are illegal in Louisiana, he must renounce his mulatto wife and bastardize his children.

Charles W. Chesnutt wrote this novel in the 1920s at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance but set it in the past. Published now for the first time, Paul Marchand, F.M.C., examines the system of race and caste in nineteenth-century New Orleans. Chesnutt reacts here against the traditional stance that leading American writers of the previous generation - Cable, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells - had taken on the issue of miscegenation in their novels.