What do you think of this fact?
Small man, big ego: hardly any historical figure is as tied to his height as Napoleon Bonaparte. There’s even a “Napoleon complex” named after him. The problem: Napoleon wasn’t actually short.
The inch that wasn’t an inch
On Napoleon’s death certificate, his doctor recorded his height as “5 pieds, 2 pouces, 4 lignes,” or 5 feet, 2 inches and 4 lines. Read that in English units and you picture someone barely over 5 foot 2. But: the old French inch was noticeably longer than the English one.
Convert it properly and, according to Britannica and History.com, you get roughly 5 feet 6 inches, about 1.67 to 1.70 meters. That made Napoleon pretty average for a man of his time. His great rival, the Duke of Wellington, was about 5 feet 8 inches (1.73 meters), so only an inch or two taller. Nobody made fun of him.
Propaganda with a pencil
British cartoonists did the rest. Britain was at war with Napoleon for years, and ridicule was a weapon. James Gillray in particular drew him again and again as a tiny little man. Britannica points to one cartoon showing him as Gulliver facing England’s King George III, a nod to “Gulliver’s Travels.”
Those images spread, the jokes got retold, and at some point the tiny Napoleon became accepted history.
The “little corporal”
Then there’s a nickname that’s easy to misread: “le petit caporal,” the little corporal. According to Britannica, it came from his own soldiers, and it was meant affectionately, not as a jab at his height.
The term “Napoleon complex” describes the idea that short men make up for their height with extra-dominant behavior. Its namesake is a pretty poor example.
So Napoleon lost battles, lost an empire, and in the end lost the fight over his own image. To a few guys with very sharp pencils.