The Actual Height Question
Napoleon Bonaparte died at what modern historians generally agree was about 5 feet 2 inches in British measure, or roughly 157 centimeters. That is shorter than the average Frenchman of his era, which hovered around 5'4" to 5'5". The whole "tiny Napoleon" myth is even more exaggerated than that, though, and the confusion traces directly to how the measurement was recorded and then republished by British sources. When Napoleon died on Saint Helena in 1821, the English-speaking press ran with the figure of 5'2" and it stuck. But the original French record listed him as 5 pieds 2 pouces. A French pied is about 1.066 British feet, and a French pouce is about 1.067 British inches. Convert that properly and you get roughly 5 feet 7 inches in modern British measure, or about 170 centimeters. That is a meaningful difference — one puts him in the "noticeably short" category and the other puts him squarely in the "average to slightly tall" range for early 19th-century France. I ran into this exact conversion problem a few years back while compiling a dataset of historical military figures for a reference project. I initially pulled the 5'2" figure from a popular encyclopedia and flagged Napoleon as below-average height. Then I cross-referenced the autopsy report from Dr. Antomarchi, which listed his height as 5 pieds 2 pouces French. Once I ran the proper unit conversion, the number jumped to ~170 cm. That single correction shifted my entire classification framework, so I now always flag the source measurement system before converting anything historical. If you are working with pre-metric European data, always note whether the original source used Paris feet, London feet, or some local variant before you convert.
The bigger issue is not the math — it is the propaganda machine that built up around Napoleon's stature. British cartoonists like James Gillray and Isaac Crocker depicted him as a tiny, raging child wielding a telescope instead of a sword. The term "Napoleon complex" entered the psychological lexicon precisely because the British press needed a way to explain why this small man from Corsica was conquering Europe. The contradiction between his physical presence and his actual battlefield dominance made for great satire and bad history. There is also the matter of personal guards. Napoleon frequently stood next to his tall Imperial Guard soldiers in portraits and photographs, which reinforced the visual impression of shortness. But those men were selected specifically for being above average height — often 6 feet or taller. Comparing him to that group tells you nothing about his actual standing relative to the general population. One counter-intuitive thing most people miss: Napoleon was not unusually short even by the stricter 5'2" figure. Average male height in early 1800s France was already quite low by modern standards due to nutrition and disease. A 5'2" man in 1815 was not dramatically shorter than his peers in the way a 5'2" man would stand out today. The cultural shock value of the "short Napoleon" image relies entirely on modern height expectations, which have risen significantly over the past two centuries.
If you want a single reliable number, go with approximately 168 centimeters, or 5 feet 6 inches, as the best modern estimate based on the French measurement system and the autopsy record. Everything below that is either a conversion error or deliberate British distortion.
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