Historian mini-rant: NAPOLEON DID NOT HAVE A NAPOLEON COMPLEX!

I was reading a respected news site today and they had an article talking about a correlation between height and heart disease. The article’s headline was “Short People More Prone to Heart Disease”

The image that accompanied the article was a picture of Napoleon.

So the writer (or editor) saw the headline “Short People” and thought it would be cute to have an image of Napoleon.

GAHHHH! NO! STOP IT!

NAPOLEON WAS NOT SHORT!

NAPOLEON DID NOT HAVE A NAPOLEON COMPLEX!

(ok …breathe.)

This is possibly my biggest historical pet peeve.

Napoleon was 5’7″ which was actually just above average height for a Frenchman in the 18th/19th century.

The reason he got called short was the French used a slightly different measurement for what constituted an inch.

French inches were slightly longer so while Napoleon was 5’7″, his published height was 5’2″ in French inches. In England, which used the inch we are familiar with, they ran with the 5’2″ “Short man” story and used it as part of a propaganda war against Napoleon. Napoleon also surrounded himself with a personal guard who were all quite tall.  (For comparison, a short basketball player is still taller than most everyone else). Napoleon’s wife was also tall for a woman of the era (About 5’5″) and in heels she could appear taller than him.  All of this did little to help dispel the myth of him being short.

The propaganda story is the one history remembers.

Conversely, it was for reasons like this that most countries around the world eventually switched to the standardized and logical metric system.

While you can’t argue that Napoleon was short, you can legitimately argue to what extent was he actually French. Napoleon was born not in France but on the island of Corsica, into a prominent Corsican family, making him Corsican.

In 1769 Corsica ceased being an independent state and was annexed by France. From that point on, children born there were citizens of France. Napoleon was born three months after the annexation, making him a French national.

While Napoleon is rightfully a polarizing figure, the impact he had on Europe and the world is too important to simply reduce his life to “stubborn short Frenchman.”  (Of that three word description, one of those words is not true and another may not even be true!)

Napoleon is worth a conversation, but one based on his actual life and actions.