So, was he really short?....
The answer is no, I have no idea why people still say that he was the shortest Emperor of the French. I mean come on people let it go! I find this very annoying. I’m not even joking. This year alone I heard it about 6 to 7 times. Saying he was very short etc. Here comes the eye roll and the twitching of the eye. Even when my husband said it, I was very annoyed and told him yelling out loud “for the thousandth time, HE WASN’T SHORT!!!” when are people going to let this slide?!?! Here we go. Here is the truth on why people even to this very day think that Napoleon Bonaparte is “short”.
With the British propaganda of the time depicting Napoleon as of smaller than average height and the image of him as a small man persists in modern Britain. Confusion has sometimes arisen because of different values for the French inch (pouces) of the time (2.7 cm) and for the Imperial inch (2.54 cm). He has been cited as being from 1.57 meters (5 ft 2 in), which made him the height of the average French male at that time, and up to 1.7 meters (5 ft 7 in) tall, which is above average for the period.
Some historians believe that the reason for the mistake about his size at death came from use of an obsolete French yardstick. Napoleon was a champion of the metric system (introduced in France in 1799) and had no use for the old yardsticks. It is more likely that he was 1.57 meters (5 ft 2 in), the height he was measured at on St. Helena (a British island), since he would have most likely been measured with an English yardstick rather than a yardstick of the Old French Regime.
Napoleon's nickname of le petit caporal has added to the confusion, as some non-Francophones have mistakenly interpreted petit by its literal meaning of "small". In fact, it is an affectionate term reflecting on his camaraderie with ordinary soldiers.
Napoleon also surrounded himself with the soldiers of his elite guard, required to be 1.83 m (6 ft) or taller, making him look smaller in comparison.
Despite his normal height, Napoleon's name has been lent to the Napoleon complex, a colloquial term describing an alleged type of inferiority complex which is said to affect some people who are physically short. The term is used more generally to describe people who are driven by a perceived handicap to overcompensate in other aspects of their lives. Nonetheless, Napoleon Bonaparte wasn’t short. He was an average man and some might say above average man. What do you think? Thank you for reading my latest post. I hope you enjoyed this article.
If you don’t know who he is and or unaware of his life span.
Here is a crash course of ‘le petit caporal’ aka Napoleon Bonaparte....
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