Did You Know?
Napoleon was not unusually short. The French inch was longer than the British inch, so while he was thought to be 5'2" by most of the world, in reality he was closer to 5'7", an average height for a Frenchman.
It turns out that Napoleon wasn't particularly short at all. Napoleon is sometimes described as being 5 foot 2 inches tall, which would definitely make him short for his era. However, there is a strong argument that this figure is wrong and that Napoleon was actually 5 foot 7 inches tall, no shorter than the average Frenchman.
Napoleon's height has been the subject of many psychological profiles. He’s sometimes cited as the chief example of "short man syndrome," whereby short men act more aggressively than their larger counterparts to make up for their lack of height. Certainly, there are few people more aggressive than a man who defeated his rivals time after time across almost an entire continent and only stopped when dragged to a very small, far away island. But if Napoleon was of average height, the easy psychology doesn't work for him.
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