The Emperor Who Was Not Short

When Napoleon Bonaparte died on the island of Saint Helena in 1821, the physician who examined the body recorded his height as five feet two inches. For two centuries the figure has been quoted to prove that the conqueror of Europe was a small man. It proves nothing of the kind. The measurement was made in French units, and the French inch was longer than the English one. Converted properly, the figure comes to about 1.68 metres, or roughly five feet six inches, which by most estimates was average or slightly above average for a Frenchman of his time.

How then did the myth take hold? Part of the answer lies in British satire. The caricaturist James Gillray, working in the years when Britain and France were at war, drew the French leader as Little Boney, a tiny and tantrum throwing figure in an oversized hat. The images were propaganda, they were very funny, and they outlived the war. Part of the answer lies with Napoleon's own side. His soldiers affectionately called him le petit caporal, a nickname about closeness and not about stature, and the tall men of his Imperial Guard, chosen partly for their size, made anyone standing beside them look smaller.

A sceptic might say the matter is trivial, because a few inches change nothing about Waterloo or the Napoleonic Code. That is true of the man, but not of the myth. The idea that small men overcompensate through ambition was later given a name, the Napoleon complex, and it has been applied to bosses, coaches and heads of state who were never as short as the label implies. A false fact about one body became a supposed law about all bodies.

A false fact about one body became a supposed law about all bodies.

The episode shows how a joke can become evidence. Nobody decided to deceive the public. A caricature, a nickname, a unit conversion and a flattering comparison each did a small part, and the sum hardened into common knowledge that few people thought to check. The figure on the autopsy report was never hidden. It was simply read by people who already knew what they expected to find. The harder question is how many other things everyone knows about the past were settled by a cartoonist first and a historian much later, if at all.