本书是对在异域他乡打拼的一个中国移民群体——巴黎温州人——持续进行十多年社会学跟踪调研的展现。研究发现，与过去相比，巴黎温州人群体不论在产业形态、居住位置，还是在组织形态、交往方式以及代际关系等方面，都有了明显的变化，集中体现在他们的行动空间与过去有了显著的差异。本书从空间重构的视角，深入刻画了巴黎温州人在中法之间、在群体内部的社会地位空间格局，以及这种格局对他们的社会融合具有的意义和价值。

Paris, the City of Light, the city of fine dining and seductive couture and intellectual hauteur, was until fairly recently always accompanied by its shadow: the city of the poor, the outcast, the criminal, the eccentric, the willfully nonconforming. In The Other Paris, Luc Sante gives us a panoramic view of that second metropolis, which has nearly vanished but whose traces are in the bricks and stones of the contemporary city, in the culture of France itself, and, by extension, throughout the world.Drawing on testimony from a great range of witnesses-from Balzac and Hugo to assorted boulevardiers, rabble-rousers, and tramps-Sante, whose thorough research is matched only by the vividness of his narration, takes the reader on a whirlwind tour. Richly illustrated with more than three hundred images, The Other Paris scuttles through the knotted streets of pre-Haussmann Paris, through the improvised accommodations of the original bohemians, through the whorehouses and dance halls and hobo shelters of the old city.
A lively survey of labor conditions, prostitution, drinking, crime, and popular entertainment, and of the reporters, réaliste singers, pamphleteers, and poets who chronicled their evolution, The Other Paris is a book meant to upend the story of the French capital, to reclaim the city from the bons vivants and the speculators, and to hold a light to the works and lives of those expunged from its center by the forces of profit.