Was Napoleon really short?

The short answer

No. When his doctor examined his body in May 1821, he wrote down just over 5 feet 2 inches in old French units. That is about 1.69 m, or 5 ft 6 in.

Frenchmen of the next generation, the men who filled his armies, averaged about 1.64 to 1.65 m. So he was average or slightly above. The "little" Napoleon grew out of British cartoons from 1803, long before the measurement usually blamed for the myth.

His height, measured

His doctor, François Antommarchi, examined the body on St Helena on 6 May 1821, the day after Napoleon died. Item 4 of his findings gives the height from the top of the head to the heels: "cinq pieds deux pouces et quatre lignes". He printed it in his memoirs in 1825 (tome 2, p. 158).

Those are the old French royal units, and each was bigger than its English namesake:

• 5 pieds × 32.48 cm = 162.4 cm
• 2 pouces × 2.71 cm = 5.4 cm
• 4 lignes × 0.23 cm = 0.9 cm
• Total: 168.7 cm, or 5 ft 6.4 in

Other records give much the same height:

At that door in 1817, Madame Bertrand, wife of his grand marshal, measured about 1.74 m. She was taller than the Emperor.

Where "five foot two" came from

"Five foot two" is the French number read as if it were English. A French inch (pouce) was about 2.71 cm; an English inch is 2.54 cm. So five French feet and two French inches come to about five feet six in English.

Some popular articles say this mix-up is partly why he is remembered as short (National Geographic). The post-mortem figure cannot be how the idea began. British cartoonists were drawing him tiny from 1803, eighteen years before it.

English readers were even given the conversion. The London translation of Antommarchi's book (we checked the 1826 edition) prints the figure with a footnote: "French measure", about five feet six (vol. 1, pp. 102–103). The mix-up may have helped keep the idea alive, but the cartoons came first.

"Little Boney"

The small Napoleon was made in British print shops. In 1798 the caricaturist James Gillray still drew him at an ordinary size (Public Domain Review). Then, in 1803, as the peace of 1802 fell apart, Gillray's prints shrank him:

• "German Nonchalence; or, the Vexation of Little Boney", 1 January 1803. The earliest "Little Boney" print we found (record).
• "Maniac-raving's, or, Little Boney in a strong fit", 24 May 1803. Napoleon in a rage, chair and globe knocked over (Yale).
• "The King of Brobdingnag, and Gulliver", 26 June 1803, designed by Thomas Braddyll and etched by Gillray. King George III studies a tiny Napoleon through a spyglass (British Museum).

The historian Marcel Dunan, writing in 1963, blamed the "little Boney" legend on British propaganda after the peace broke down (study).

Why he could look short

His Guard. From 1804, a grenadier of the Imperial Guard was meant to be at least 1.78 m, and he wore a tall bearskin cap. In practice the rule bent. Grenadiers of the 1st regiment who joined in 1810–12 averaged about 1.75 m, and nearly 60 percent were under the minimum (Dawson). Beside them, Dunan argued, a slight man in a plain colonel's uniform could look smaller.

His nickname. His soldiers called him "le petit caporal", the little corporal. Tradition ties it to the battle of Lodi in 1796 and to a general who was close to his men (Fondation Napoléon). We found no document linking it to his height, or using it in 1796.

What is documented, and what is still open

Documented: the post-mortem figure (printed 1825), Gourgaud's two measurements (from his day-by-day journal) and the dates of the Gillray prints.

Estimated: average height. Scholars rebuild it from conscription records: about 1.64 to 1.65 m for Frenchmen born in the 1780s to 1800s (Komlos and others; Weir). They have no estimate for men born before the 1780s, including his own year, 1769.

Still open:

• Whether the inch mix-up mattered at all. Popular articles say it did. We found no historian who shows it happening.
• Who held the measuring rule in 1821. Dunan says Napoleon's valet Marchand helped. We have not seen Marchand's memoir.
• The "5 ft 7 in" from his funeral. Dunan read it as his height. In the upholsterer Andrew Darling's journal it is the inside length of the coffin, not a measurement of his body (journal).
• The "Napoleon complex". The idea that short men overcompensate has an unclear origin, and the few studies of it are mixed (Knapen and others, 2018).