Napoleon Was Short: The Ruler Who Wasn't

There is a whole psychological complex named after him. The “Napoleon complex” — the idea that short men compensate for their lack of height with aggression, domineering behaviour and an outsized hunger for power — is one of those pieces of folk psychology so embedded in the language that people reach for it without a moment’s doubt. It rests on a single assumed fact: that Napoleon Bonaparte, the most consequential European of his age, was a small man. He was not. He stood somewhere around five foot six or five foot seven, a perfectly ordinary height for a Frenchman of his era, taller than the average conscript in his own army. The most famous short man in history was, by the standards of his own time, average. How he shrank is one of the cleaner case studies in how a myth is built, because we can watch nearly every brick go into place.

The measurements and the two inches

Begin with the number, because the number is where the confusion was born and where it can be undone. When Napoleon died in exile on Saint Helena in May 1821, his body was measured during the autopsy. The figure recorded by his physician, François Carlo Antommarchi, was five feet two inches. To a modern ear that sounds tiny, and that is precisely the trap, because the measurement was taken in French units. The pied de roi, the French royal foot, was longer than the English foot, and its inch, the pouce, was correspondingly longer. Convert Napoleon’s five pieds two pouces into the imperial measure that the English-speaking world uses, and you arrive at roughly five feet six and a half or five feet seven inches.

That single unit-conversion error is the seed of the whole legend. An Englishman reading “five feet two” in the years after Waterloo had no reason to suspect he was reading French inches, and every reason, given the temper of the times, to be delighted by a diminutive enemy. The number was true and the conclusion drawn from it was false, and the gap between them was one foreign ruler and one foreign inch.

Corroborating evidence points the same way. Napoleon’s surviving clothing, held in various collections, is consistent with a man of average build and height, not a notably small one. Contemporaries who met him and left descriptions do not, on the whole, register him as strikingly short; the impression they record is of a man of unremarkable stature and remarkable intensity. The stature was ordinary. Only the intensity was not.

The nickname that pointed the wrong way

If the arithmetic planted the seed, an affectionate nickname watered it. Napoleon’s soldiers called him le petit caporal — the little corporal. To the modern ear “little” is a statement about size, and so the nickname reads like independent confirmation that the emperor was small. It was nothing of the kind. In the French of the Grande Armée, petit here carried warmth rather than measurement; it was a term of familiar affection from the ranks for a commander they regarded as one of their own, a young officer who had risen through merit and shared their hardships. The English, encountering the phrase, took it literally, and a soldiers’ endearment became a description of the body.

There was also, running alongside, a matter of company. Napoleon’s personal guard, the elite Imperial Guard, were selected in part for their height and their imposing physical presence. A man of average stature standing habitually among deliberately tall, bearskin-hatted grenadiers will look smaller than he is, in life and even more so in the paintings that recorded the scene. The visual context worked steadily against him: everywhere the emperor appeared, he was framed by the largest men his empire could find.

The cartoonist who built the giant-killer in reverse

The decisive hand belonged to a single English caricaturist, James Gillray, and behind him the whole apparatus of British wartime propaganda. From the late 1790s and through the Napoleonic Wars, Gillray and his fellow satirists produced a torrent of prints depicting Bonaparte as a ranting, undersized figure — “Little Boney” — a tiny tyrant in an enormous hat, stamping and raging and being dandled or bested by robust, oversized Britons like the giant King George or the stout John Bull. The device was ancient and effective. Shrink your enemy and you strip him of menace; make the man threatening a continent into a squalling doll and you convert national terror into national laughter.

It worked as propaganda precisely because it consoled. Britain spent more than two decades in a state of genuine dread of French invasion, and a population living under that shadow found real relief in the image of the threat as something small enough to laugh at, something a proper Englishman could pick up and put in his pocket. Gillray’s Little Boney was psychologically necessary, and the prints circulated in enormous numbers, cheap and everywhere, imprinting the tiny Napoleon on the British imagination far more durably than any autopsy figure ever could. By the time the wars were over, the caricature had outlived its purpose and hardened into a fact. The man was gone to Saint Helena and then to his grave; the doll remained.

Where the belief was really coming from

Trace the myth back through its layers and something clarifying emerges. Not one of the pillars holding up “Napoleon was short” is a measurement of Napoleon. The autopsy number was a foreign unit misread; the nickname was affection misheard; the tall guardsmen were a trick of framing; the tiny tyrant was enemy propaganda designed to make a frightened nation feel safe. At no point did anyone measure the emperor and find him small. The belief was assembled entirely from things that pointed at smallness for reasons of their own, and the assembly held because the finished shape was so satisfying that nobody went back to check the parts.

That satisfaction is the real engine, and it is worth naming, because it explains the myth’s remarkable durability. A short man of towering ambition who conquered most of a continent is a far better story than an average-sized one who did the same. It suggests a hidden logic to greatness — that the drive to dominate springs from a wound, that the man who would rule the world is compensating for something he lacks. This is a deeply appealing idea, because it makes ambition legible and slightly pitiable, and it lets the rest of us feel that we, ordinary and unconquering, have simply been spared the deforming pressure that produced a Bonaparte. The Napoleon complex, the whole named syndrome, is downstream of a translation error, and it flatters everyone who invokes it.

Contemporary witnesses who saw Napoleon in the flesh, rather than in a Gillray print, described him in terms nobody would use for a small man. Captain Frederick Lewis Maitland, the Royal Navy officer aboard whose ship, HMS Bellerophon, Napoleon formally surrendered in July 1815, recorded the emperor in his own published narrative of the surrender as a man of about five feet seven, stout and thickset — a firsthand description, taken at close range in good light, that lines up almost exactly with the corrected imperial-unit figure and nowhere near the caricature. The Duke of Wellington, the general who had just beaten him at Waterloo and had no reason at all to be generous to a defeated rival, stood around five feet nine. Victor and vanquished were separated by a couple of inches, not the gulf the folklore has always required.

The autopsy, the exhumation, and the measured man

The circumstances of that death measurement are worth a closer look, because they show how thin the evidentiary thread really was. The autopsy at Longwood House on Saint Helena in May 1821 was conducted by Antommarchi in the presence of several British doctors, including Archibald Arnott, who had attended Napoleon in his final illness. The recorded stature, taken from a body and filtered through the units and conventions of the men holding the tape, is the sole “hard” figure anyone ever cites — and it is precisely the figure that the French-to-English inch mangles. When Napoleon’s remains were exhumed in 1840 for the ceremonial return to France, the retour des cendres, witnesses who saw the remarkably well-preserved body again recorded impressions consistent with a man of ordinary size. There was never a second, independent, imperial-measure figure that made him small; there was only the one French number, read wrong, forever.

The science that the “Napoleon complex” leans on has fared no better under scrutiny. When the University of Central Lancashire researcher Mike Eslea ran an experiment in 2007 pitting men of different heights against each other in a controlled game with a mild provocation, he found that it was the taller men who were more likely to lose their temper, the reverse of the folk expectation. Other studies have found small or context-dependent effects, and no robust, general law of short-man aggression has ever been established. The syndrome named after Napoleon rests on shaky ground twice over: the man was not short, and the trait may not reliably exist.

The complex named after a mistake

The final irony sits in the psychology textbooks, or at least in the popular idea of them. The “Napoleon complex” describes something people do genuinely observe in the world — the phenomenon of the small man who overcompensates — and attaches it to a historical figure who did not have the trait the syndrome requires. When researchers have actually gone looking for the effect, the results have been mixed and modest; some studies find shorter men behaving more assertively or more jealously in specific settings, others find nothing much, and the tidy folk-psychological law is far shakier than its confident use in conversation suggests. But the phrase persists regardless, because it does not really depend on Napoleon or on data. It depends on the story we have already agreed to tell about height and hunger, and Napoleon is merely the face we hung it on, chosen for a smallness he did not possess.

What is genuinely interesting about this myth is how little resistance the truth has met. The unit conversion has been public for two centuries; the average height is not in serious dispute among historians; and still, ask a room full of educated people how tall Napoleon was, and most will say, with real confidence, that he was short. The correction never sticks because the myth is doing work the correction cannot. “He was an ordinary five foot seven” explains nothing and consoles no one. “He was a tiny man consumed by the need to compensate” explains his whole life and reassures us about our own. Between an accurate measurement and a satisfying story, the story wins, and it keeps winning, one repeated certainty at a time.

For companion studies in confident, comforting falsehoods that outlive their own debunking, see the myth that we use only ten per cent of our brains, another flattering account of hidden capacity, and the myth that Einstein failed maths, where a great man’s reputation was bent to soothe the anxieties of ordinary students.