Napoleon's Height: Feet, Inches and a Propaganda War

Napoleon's famous "five feet two" was measured in French units. See what the records say, how to convert them, and how British cartoons shrank him.

Muninn · Last reviewed October 24, 2026 · 6 min read

Ask people what they know about Napoleon Bonaparte's body and most will tell you one thing: he was tiny. The idea is so familiar that his name has become shorthand for a short man with something to prove.

The surviving measurements tell a calmer story. They put him at an ordinary height, and they show how a mix-up over units, a few contradictory eyewitnesses and a burst of wartime cartooning turned a man of normal size into a punch line.

This guide walks through the evidence, does the arithmetic in the open and explains why the myth has been so hard to shake.

Where "five foot two" comes from

The famous figure is real. It just was not measured in the feet and inches most English speakers use.

Napoleon's valet, Louis Constant Wairy, whose memoirs were first published in French in 1830, gives the figure plainly. In Walter Clark's 1895 English translation the line reads: "His height was five feet, two inches, three lines." A second measurement, taken by Antommarchi with Marchand's help and recorded in Marchand's memoirs, gives the full height, from the top of the head to the heels, as 5 pieds, 2 pouces and 4 lignes.

Those are old French units. The pied was the French foot, the pouce the French inch, and the ligne a much smaller unit still. Read them as English feet and inches and you get a man of about five foot two. Read them correctly and you get someone noticeably taller.

Doing the conversion

The old French foot was longer than the English foot, so every French measurement looks smaller than it really is if you forget to convert it.

In a short note published in 1963 in the Revue de l'Institut Napoléon, and now posted by the Fondation Napoléon, historian Marcel Dunan reproduced a calculation for the St. Helena figure supplied by a reader, Colonel Raugel. Using 32.47 cm for a pied, 2.7 cm for a pouce and 0.22 cm for a ligne, he arrived at 1.686 meters. That is roughly five feet six inches in English measure.

The same note cites a second, independent record. An English upholsterer named Andrew Darling, charged with taking exact measurements with General Montholon present, wrote down 5 feet 7 inches in English units, which the note converts to about 1.70 meters. The conclusion Dunan prints is cautious and clear: from these two records, Napoleon's height was not less than 1.686 meters.

You can see how easily the confusion arises in the English translation of Constant's own memoirs. When Constant describes Eugène de Beauharnais, Josephine's son, as "about five feet three or four inches," the 1895 translator, Walter Clark, adds a bracketed note: "About five feet six or seven inches in English measurement." When Constant gives Napoleon's own height later in the same book, no such note appears. A reader moving quickly through the book would take one figure as converted and the other as English, without realizing they are the same kind of number.

The eyewitnesses did not agree

Measurements are only part of the record. Contemporaries also described Napoleon, and they did not describe him the same way.

Dunan opens his note by admitting that on Napoleon's height, as on his whole physical appearance down to the color of his eyes, the testimonies remained highly contradictory, from Méneval to Constant to Antommarchi. Even when measurements were taken, he adds, they tell us only imperfectly.

He also flags a simple typo that shows how numbers drift. An earlier article in the same journal had printed 1.64 meters when it should have read 1.68. One slipped digit is enough to knock about four centimeters off a famous man.

Not every witness saw a small man. Dunan quotes a letter of April 6, 1802, from a young Englishman, John Leslie Foster, who attended a reception at the Tuileries after the Peace of Amiens and put the First Consul at "environ 5 pieds, 7 pouces," about five feet seven. Dunan does not say which units Foster himself used, a reminder of how easily the question of units creeps back in.

Why he looked small anyway

If Napoleon was ordinary in height, why did so many people remember him as small? Dunan's answer is that impressions were relative.

As First Consul and Emperor, before he grew stout in later years, Napoleon stood out from his entourage, which was athletic and richly decorated, by his slight build and his plain colonel's uniform of the chasseurs, topped by his legendary little hat with a single cockade. Around him, the extravagant plumes of a commander like Murat and the tall bearskin caps of his grenadiers made already tall men look even taller.

His nickname did not help. The English edition of Bourrienne's memoirs, in a chapter on the return from Elba that its editors compiled from other works of the time, describes soldiers shouting "Vive le petit Caporal!" alongside "We will die for our old comrade!" That was an expression of affection from his own troops, not a measurement, but the word "petit" travels easily into English as "little."

Little Boney: the cartoon war

The biggest push came from Napoleon's enemies. Dunan writes that from the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens, British propaganda and its caricaturists worked the theme of the little great man, attacking "le petit Boney" and mangling his name along with his person.

He singles out an 1803 print by James Gillray that shrinks Napoleon to a Lilliputian Gulliver, standing in the palm of a giant King of Brobdingnag, George III, who studies him through a spyglass. He also mentions a later print by Cruikshank that perches the emperor like a small bird on the finger of a gigantic Marshal Blücher.

The Library of Congress holds another Gillray print from 1803, "Maniac-raving's-or-Little Boney in a strong fit," which its catalog describes as a cartoon showing Napoleon in a fury over relations between France and England. The Fondation Napoléon's period glossary adds that during the invasion scare of 1803 to 1805, British propaganda painted Napoleon as the devil incarnate and called him Boney, a name that was itself corrupted to Bogey and Bogeyman.

Images like these are memorable in a way that a line in a valet's memoir is not. Two centuries later, the cartoon is what most people remember.

What we can and cannot say

The sources differ by a couple of centimeters, roughly 1.686 to 1.70 meters, and contemporary impressions differed far more. Historians can say with confidence that the "five foot two" figure is in French units and that, converted, it describes a man of about five foot six or seven. No surviving measurement supports the picture of a strikingly tiny man.

What this guide does not do is claim exactly how Napoleon compared with the average Frenchman of his day. That requires population data on soldiers and civilians, and it is a separate question from the one the myth gets wrong.

How to check a height claim yourself

The Napoleon story is a useful template for any historical measurement.

Ask what units the original source used, and whether they match yours.
Find out who did the measuring, when, and under what circumstances.
Compare independent records rather than trusting a single figure.
Watch for typos and rounding as numbers are copied from one book to the next.
Consider the source's purpose. A caricature is designed to mock, not to measure.

Key takeaways

Napoleon's often-quoted "five feet two" was recorded in old French units, which were longer than English ones.
Converted, the St. Helena measurement comes to about 1.686 meters, and an English upholsterer recorded 5 feet 7 inches in English units.
Eyewitnesses contradicted each other, and his plain uniform among tall, plumed officers made him look smaller.
British caricatures of "Little Boney" from 1803 on did more than any measurement to fix the image of a tiny Napoleon.
When you meet a historical number, check the units, the measurer and the motive before you repeat it.

Sources

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