Napoleon was not short: he was measured in French inches

The legend of a tiny emperor comes from an old French unit of length, a crowd of very tall guardsmen, and British cartoonists who drew him the size of a child.

Ask people for one fact about Napoleon's body and many will say he was short. The idea is so settled that it gave its name to a supposed personality type, the Napoleon complex: small men making up for their size with aggression. The measurements we have describe a man of ordinary height.

On Saint Helena, the island where Napoleon spent his last years and died in 1821, his doctor François Antommarchi, helped by his valet Louis Marchand, recorded his height from the top of his head to his heels: 5 pieds, 2 pouces and 4 lignes. Five feet two inches, and a little more.

Those were French feet and inches. Before the metric system, France had its own units, and they were longer than the English ones. The French foot was about 32.5 centimetres against the English 30.5, and the French inch about 2.7 centimetres against the English 2.54. Read in English units, 5 feet 2 sounds small. Converted, it is about 1.69 metres.

An Englishman on the island, the upholsterer Andrew Darling, measured him too and wrote down 5 feet 7 in English units, about 1.70 metres. Two measurements in two systems agree: Napoleon was close to the average height of a man of his time.

How he shrank

Part of the impression was real, but relative. As consul and young emperor he was slight, and he dressed plainly, often in a simple colonel's uniform and his small hat with a single cockade. Around him stood marshals in plumes and the unusually tall grenadiers of his Guard in towering bearskin caps. Next to them, almost anyone would have looked small.

The rest was propaganda. After the peace between Britain and France broke down in 1803, British caricaturists turned him into Little Boney, a tantrum-throwing figure the size of a child. James Gillray, the best known of them, drew him that way again and again, and the image outlived the wars by two centuries.

So the short emperor is the sum of a unit conversion nobody makes any more, a crowd of tall men, and some very effective cartoons. The tape measure says ordinary.