Napoleon wasn't short. British cartoonists just kept drawing him that way.
Napoleon Bonaparte is estimated to have stood about 1.67 metres, roughly average for a Frenchman of his day. Part of the confusion came from old French inches, which were longer than English ones. The rest came from British cartoonists like James Gillray, who shrank him to mock his ambitions. The caricature outlived the man.
Napoleon's recorded height was 5 feet 2 inches, but in pre-metric French units. Converted, that is about 1.67 metres, or just under 5 feet 6 inches in imperial measure, which was close to the average height of an adult man at the time, depending on the source used. Some historians put him at about 1.70 metres, citing a measurement taken on Saint Helena. Either way, he was not unusually small.
The myth owes a lot to British political cartoonists, especially James Gillray, who repeatedly drew Napoleon as a tiny figure to ridicule him and his expansionist ambitions. The picture was so memorable that it came to define him, and it later gave its name to a supposed psychological condition, the 'Napoleon complex': the idea that short men compensate for their height with aggression and a hunger for power.
Whether that complex exists is genuinely disputed, and psychology tends to treat the term as a derogatory stereotype. Some studies claim to find it. Researchers at the University of Groningen reported that shorter men were more prone to jealousy, and a 2018 study at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam found shorter men behaved more indirectly aggressively toward taller opponents in competitive laboratory games. Other research suggests that what matters is dissatisfaction with one's height rather than height itself.
Other studies point the opposite way. A 2007 University of Central Lancashire experiment, in which pairs of men duelled with sticks and one deliberately rapped the other's knuckles, found the taller men were more likely to lose their temper. The researcher suggested we notice aggression in short men because their height is the most obvious thing about them. The Wessex Growth Study, which followed British children into adulthood, found no personality differences attributable to height. The history lesson is simple: a good cartoon can beat the facts for two centuries.
Source: Wikipedia — Napoleon complex · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
