Napoleon's Height
napoleon was not unusually short. the famous 5 foot 2 was a french royal measurement misread as english inches, and the tiny tyrant image was british cartoon propaganda.
You picture Napoleon as tiny. Five foot two. The little tyrant with the oversized ego. One British cartoonist did that to you, and it stuck for two hundred years.
So we pulled his autopsy. When Napoleon died in exile on Saint Helena, his physician Francesco Antommarchi performed the autopsy on 6 May 1821 with British officers present, and recorded his height in the French units of the era: five pieds, two pouces.
Here is the catch. A French pied du roi and its pouce were larger than the English foot and inch. A pouce measured about 2.71 cm; an English inch is 2.54 cm. Anyone who read 5 pieds 2 pouces as English feet and inches, which is exactly what happened as the figure crossed the Channel, got the wrong man.
Converted correctly, five pieds two pouces is about 168 cm, roughly 5 foot 6 to 5 foot 7. That was average, even a touch tall, for a French man in the early 1800s.
So where did tiny come from? The British caricaturist James Gillray. From around 1803 he drew Napoleon as Little Boney, a thumb-sized, raging tyrant with an oversized head. The image was so damaging that Napoleon reportedly said Gillray's cartoons did more than all the armies of Europe to bring him down. It did not help that Napoleon was often flanked by his hand-picked Imperial Guard grenadiers, who were selected for their height.
Verdict: BS. Napoleon was not short. The measurement was foreign, and the propaganda was smaller.
The receipts are at bskiller.com/reels.
Sources: Britannica, History.com, The Public Domain Review, National Portrait Gallery, Wikipedia (Napoleon complex).
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