Paul Tulane was the son of Louis Tulasne (deformed to "Tulane"), a French merchant based in the colony of Saint-Domingue who emigrated to the Sherry Valley, New Jersey following the Haitian Revolution. The Tulasne family occupied prominent legal and mercantile positions in France and its colonies before the French Revolution. Paul was baptized in Rillé by his uncle, Pierre Tulasne, and was a devout Catholic throughout his life.

Paul Tulane was educated in private schools, including Somerville Academy in New Jersey, until the age of fifteen. He then worked briefly in a store in Princeton. From 1818, he spent three years traveling the southern United States with his older brother Louis Stephen Tulane and his first cousin Paul Tulasne-Jaminière (1795, Rillé – 1830, Tours), a lawyer.

In 1840, Tulane and his father visited Rillé and the commercial ports of France. On observing the decadence of the foreign trade ports of Nantes and Bordeaux (his father had left Bordeaux in 1790^[1]) due to slave revolts in the West Indies, he was convinced that a similar fate would befall New Orleans in the event of emancipation in the United States.

It was from his two tours that Tulane developed a keen interest in the economic, cultural, social, and educational development of New Orleans, and ended up devoting his fortune to it, which was already $250,000 in 1840.^[2]

In 1822, Tulane established Paul Tulane and Co. in New Orleans, a retail and wholesale dry goods and clothing business. Later, he invested in real estate in both New Orleans and New Jersey. By 1828, he had amassed a fortune of over $150,000. His business operated for nearly 40 years and retired with a large fortune in 1857.

Around this time, Tulane bought the John P. Stockton home in Princeton, now known as the Walter Lowrie House, where he subsequently resided. During the American Civil War, Tulane was the largest donor in New Orleans to the Confederate States of America, but the historian John D. Winters in Civil War in Louisiana (1963) does not provide the amount Tulane contributed.^[3] He donated $300 (1874 value) to erect a Confederate monument in Greenwood Cemetery. Tulane has been described as one of the most generous contributors to the Ladies' Benevolent Association of Louisiana, an institution dedicated to producing Confederate monuments.^[4]

For many years, Tulane gave liberally to the charitable institutions and Presbyterian churches of Princeton and New Orleans.

In 1882, he donated $363,000 (1882 value) to improve higher education in the city of New Orleans. Tulane's Act of Donation ultimately resulted in the renaming of the University of Louisiana (founded as the Medical College of Louisiana) to the Tulane University of Louisiana, in his honor, and turned the once-public institution into a private one, the only such instance in United States history.

Tulane died near Princeton and is buried in the Princeton Cemetery on Witherspoon Street. In his honor, he has several streets named after him throughout the country, including Tulane Street in Princeton, and Tulane Avenue in New Orleans.

• Depue, Opgden Mary (1915). Memorial Encyclopedia of New Jersey. Vol. 4.
• Dumas Malone (ed.). Dictionary of American Biography.
• John P. Dyer (1966). Tulane: The Biography of a University, 1834-1965.
• John Smith Kendall, "Paul Tulane," Louisiana Historical Quarterly, XX (1937).
• Hageman, John Frelinghuysen (1878). History of Princeton and its Institutions. Vol. 2. pp. 198–201.
• "Paul Tulane". A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography. Vol. 2. 1988. pp. 799–800.
• Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921).
• transcription of transfer documents - departmental archives of Indre et Loire, France.