Histoire croisée als onderbouw bij onderzoek naar primitieve rebellen – casus Jan de Lichte van Louis Paul Boon (Vlaanderen) en Juraj Jánošík van Andrej Melicherčík (Slowakije)

In this contribution we focus on the study of so-called social bandits, as they are known from the study Primitive Rebels by Eric Hobsbawm (1959). We focus more specifically on the Flemish case of Jan de Lichte and the Slovak case of Juraj Jánošík. In this contribution we use the histoire croisée method, suggested by the French-German historians Werner and Zimmermann (2006). They claim that in this “crossed history”, social, cultural and political groups are under intercultural influence and offer an alternative to the dominant national point of view. We perceive the hero-image around both heroic figures from the 1950s and 1960s in a distinct Marxist tradition and notice a different image in the Flemish literary adaptation, which remained to a large extent a regional phenomenon.