Abstract: In Baudelaire and 19th Century Paris, the German philosopher Benjamin first put forward the idea of “city wanderers”. “City wanderers” have aesthetic vision and unique insight, they drift in the city, free from the crowd, addicted to thinking. They try to reconstruct modern urban experience and reveal the essence of modern life through individual experience. Baudelaire captured the great changes at the social level, and later depicted various chaotic and morbid modern experiences in his poetry collection The Flowers of Evil. Li Jinfa, who studied in Paris, France, was the first poet to introduce symbolism to China. It is not difficult to find that Baudelaire and Li Jinfa have overlapping modern urban experience, and the image of “city wanderers” appeared in their works. The purpose of this study is to explore the similarities and differences of the images of “city wanderers” in Baudelaire’s and Li Jinfa’s works as well as the causes, which has important practical significance and academic value for a deeper understanding of the relationship between cultural factors and individual creation in the interaction of Chinese and French literature.

Keywords: city wanderer; Baudelaire; Li Jinfa; modernity