Paul Marchand F.M.C.

Never before published this novel written in the 1920s disputes prevailing attitudes on racial character and identity. <P>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 is 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. <P>Charles W. Chesnutt wrote this novel at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance but set it in the past a time and place favored by George Washington Cable. Published now for the first time <i>Paul Marchand F. M. C.</i> examines the system of race and caste in nineteenth-century New Orleans. Chesnutt reacts against the traditional stance that fiction by leading American writers of the previous generation had taken on the issue of miscegenation. <P>Chesnutt resolves Marchand’s dilemma with a surprising plo