--- title: "Napoleon was not short: his 1821 Saint Helena measurement was in French feet, about 5 ft 6½ in" url: https://badiyaa.com/napoleon-height-myth-french-feet/ published: 2026-10-19T22:13:00+01:00 modified: 2026-10-19T17:30:04+01:00 section: History publisher: Badiyaa --- # Napoleon was not short: his 1821 Saint Helena measurement was in French feet, about 5 ft 6½ in His doctor recorded five pieds, two pouces and four lignes. French units were longer than English ones, and a British cartoonist did the rest from 1803. The number behind the legend of a tiny Napoleon is real. It was written down on Saint Helena in May 1821, shortly after he died, by his physician, Francesco Antommarchi, who measured the body when he carried out the autopsy. In the doctor’s own account, item four on his list reads: “La hauteur totale, du sommet de la tête aux talons, était de cinq pieds deux pouces et quatre lignes.” Five feet, two inches and four lines. Read with an English ruler, that is a small man. Read with the ruler Antommarchi was actually using, it is not. ## Two different feet Antommarchi measured in the old royal units of France, not in British ones. The French *pied du roi*, or king’s foot, was about 32.48 centimeters long, noticeably longer than the English foot of 30.48. Its *pouce*, the French inch, was about 27.07 millimeters, and a *ligne* was a twelfth of that. Those units survived for centuries and, as the [history of French measurement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_French_units_of_measurement) shows, stayed in everyday use for decades after the metric system arrived, because people disliked the change. Here is the conversion, worked out step by step: - 5 pieds × 32.48 cm = 162.40 cm - 2 pouces × 2.707 cm = 5.41 cm - 4 lignes × 0.2256 cm = 0.90 cm - Total: about 168.7 cm, or roughly 5 feet 6½ inches in US measure Misreading the same figure as English feet and inches gives 157.5 cm. The gap between the two readings is about 11 centimeters, a little over four inches, and that unit mix-up is enough to turn an ordinary-sized man into a punchline. A second witness on the island points the same way. The Fondation Napoléon, the Paris foundation devoted to his history, cites the journal of Andrew Darling, an English upholsterer on Saint Helena who took his own measurements with General Montholon present and recorded “5 pieds, 7 inches” in English units, or about 1.70 meters. The foundation also quotes the memoirs of Louis Marchand, Napoleon’s valet, who helped Antommarchi: they give the same five feet, two inches and four lines. Its conclusion was that he stood no less than 1.686 meters. Even in 1802, a young English visitor to the Tuileries, John Leslie Foster, put the First Consul at about five feet seven. The [entry on the “Napoleon complex”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_complex) puts him close to the average height for men of his era. He only looked slight because of the company he kept: tall grenadiers in bearskin hats, and plumed marshals such as Joachim Murat, next to a man who favored a plain colonel’s coat and a simple hat. ## How a cartoonist shrank him The small Napoleon was a British wartime product. After the Peace of Amiens collapsed in 1803, London printmakers set out to cut the French leader down to size, literally. James Gillray had already drawn him as “Little Boney” in prints such as *Maniac Raving’s, or Little Boney in a Strong Fit*. On June 26, 1803, Gillray published *The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver*, from a drawing by Thomas Braddyll, a Coldstream Guards lieutenant and amateur caricaturist. It borrows the giant king from Jonathan Swift’s novel. George III, enormous, holds a doll-sized Napoleon in one hand and studies him through a spyglass. A sequel followed in 1804, the print shown at the top of this page, in which the king and queen watch a miniature Napoleon sail a toy boat around a tank. The joke sold, and the scale stuck. Two hundred years later the image of a pint-sized emperor survives in a psychological label for short, aggressive men, even though the studies on that label are mixed, and a 2007 study at the University of Central Lancashire found short men were less likely to lose their temper than taller ones. ## What the record says Antommarchi’s account, *Les derniers moments de Napoléon*, is the place to check it; the measurement sits on page 117 of the second volume of the 1898 Paris edition by Garnier Frères, which can be read in full online. The line is in French, and it never said he was short. It said five pieds, two pouces and four lignes, a height of about 168.7 centimeters. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Napoleon complex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_complex) - [Wikipedia: Traditional French units of measurement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_French_units_of_measurement) *Image: James Gillray, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*