Was Napoleon Really Short? The Corsican Outsider Who Crowned Himself Emperor

No, Napoleon was not really short. He stood about 168 cm, or roughly 5 feet 6 inches, which was an average height for a man of his time; the image of a tiny, tantrum-prone emperor owes a great deal to British newspapers and cartoonists who mocked him as "Little Boney". The myth survives because it makes a good joke about ambition. The real story is stranger: an islander who spoke French with an accent rose in barely ten years from artillery officer to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left laws that still shape daily life in many countries.

An islander from Ajaccio

Napoleon was born on 15 August 1769 in Ajaccio, on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, to Carlo Maria Buonaparte and Maria Letizia Ramolino. The timing mattered. Corsica had become French only one year earlier, when the Republic of Genoa ceded it to France in 1768. Had he been born a little sooner, the most famous Frenchman in history would have been born a subject of Genoa.

His first languages were Corsican and Italian, not French. He arrived on the French mainland in January 1779, aged nine, and for the rest of his life he spoke French with a Corsican accent and spelled it poorly. Anyone who has learned a second language as a child will recognise the situation: fluent enough to command, never quite free of the outsider's sound.

His mother was the strongest influence of his childhood, and he later credited mothers in general with shaping a child's future.

A bullied cadet becomes an artillery officer

At school in Brienne-le-Château he was bullied by classmates for his origins. He entered the École militaire in Paris in September 1784 and graduated a year later, the first Corsican ever to do so, then was commissioned as a second lieutenant in an artillery regiment.

Artillery was the right branch for him. It rewarded mathematics, planning and an eye for terrain rather than aristocratic connections, and the French Revolution, which began in 1789, was about to sweep away many of the aristocratic officers who would otherwise have blocked his path.

Toulon, Paris, and a "whiff of grapeshot"

His first big chance came in 1793 at the Siege of Toulon, where royalist rebels and a British fleet held the harbour. As artillery commander, Napoleon planned the assault on a hill fort overlooking the port, and the city fell on 16–17 December 1793.

Two years later he helped save the revolutionary government itself. On 5 October 1795, known as 13 Vendémiaire, royalist crowds marched on the Convention in Paris. Working under Paul Barras, Napoleon turned artillery on the rebels; estimates of the dead range from about 300 to 1,400. The historian Thomas Carlyle later called it "the whiff of grapeshot".

In March 1796 he married Joséphine de Beauharnais in a civil ceremony, and almost immediately left to command the French army in Italy.

Italy and Egypt: the making of a legend

The Italian campaign of 1796–97 turned him into a celebrity. His army won a string of victories, including Arcole and Rivoli; at Rivoli in January 1797 the Austrians lost 43 percent of their soldiers killed, wounded or captured.

In 1798 he led an expedition to Egypt. He won the Battle of the Pyramids in July, but days later the British navy destroyed his fleet at the Battle of the Nile. Militarily the expedition went badly. Culturally it had a long afterlife: the scholars who travelled with the army found the Rosetta Stone, and their work was published in the great Description de l'Égypte. The stone later became the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, a nice reminder that a translation problem can outlast an empire.

From First Consul to Emperor

Back in France, Napoleon joined a coup in November 1799, the "18 Brumaire", that overthrew the government known as the Directory. He became First Consul, the most powerful man in the country.

He moved fast to rebuild a state shaken by a decade of revolution. The Concordat of 1801 made peace with the Catholic Church: the pope recognised his regime, and the regime recognised Catholicism as the religion of most of France. In 1802 he created the Legion of Honour to reward service to the state; it remains France's highest decoration.

On 2 December 1804, at Notre-Dame de Paris, he was anointed by the pope and then placed the crown on his own head before crowning Joséphine. The gesture said clearly where his power came from: not from the Church, and not from birth, but from himself.

The code that outlived the empire

If you want to know why Napoleon still matters outside history books, start with his laws. The civil code implemented in March 1804, later known as the Napoleonic Code, guaranteed equality before the law, religious toleration and secure property rights. It also reduced the rights of women and children and restricted divorce. French armies carried it across Europe, and it went on to influence law in western Europe, Latin America, Louisiana and Quebec.

He also built elite secondary schools called lycées, founded the Imperial University in 1808 and introduced the baccalaureate the following year. The metric system, officially introduced in France in 1801, spread with his armies through western Europe.

There is a darker side to the record. In 1802 he reintroduced slavery in French colonies, and the attempt to reconquer Saint-Domingue failed; the former slaves proclaimed the independent republic of Haiti in 1804. He also ended the free press and restored hereditary monarchy and nobility.

Austerlitz to Moscow: overreach

On 2 December 1805, exactly a year after his coronation, he crushed Austria and Russia at Austerlitz, a victory that led to the end of the Holy Roman Empire. But at sea Britain was untouchable: after Trafalgar in October 1805, the Royal Navy was never again seriously challenged by his fleet. Unable to invade Britain, he tried to strangle its trade with an embargo called the Continental System, which drew him into the long, costly war in Spain and Portugal.

In 1810 he divorced Joséphine, who had not given him an heir, and married Marie Louise of Austria; their son was born in March 1811. The next year he invaded Russia with a Grande Armée of around 450,000 frontline troops. He reached Moscow, but the retreat that winter was a catastrophe, and only about 75,000 troops made it back to allied territory.

Elba, the Hundred Days, and Waterloo

Defeated at Leipzig in October 1813, he abdicated in April 1814 and was exiled to the island of Elba. Less than a year later he escaped with about a thousand men and took back power for what became known as the Hundred Days. It ended at Waterloo on 18 June 1815.

This time the British sent him to Saint Helena, a remote island in the South Atlantic. He died there on 5 May 1821, aged 51. Autopsy reports concluded he died of stomach cancer; a later theory of arsenic poisoning has been undermined by evidence that arsenic was common in everyday products of the time, and a 2021 study again pointed to stomach cancer. In 1840 his remains were brought back to Paris and buried at Les Invalides.

Was he an enlightened reformer or a megalomaniac whose wars cost millions of lives? Historians still disagree, and the Napoleonic Wars are estimated to have cost six million lives. What nobody disputes is the scale of the man, whatever his height.

Learn with Napoleon: five expressions for English learners

Napoleon's story is full of English that you can reuse in everyday conversation about work, sport and ambition.

Phrase	What it means	Example
to meet your Waterloo	to suffer a final, decisive defeat	The champion finally met his Waterloo in the final.
to rise through the ranks	to move up step by step in an organisation	She rose through the ranks from intern to director.
to overreach	to try to do more than you can manage	The company overreached by opening ten shops at once.
a comeback	a return to success after failure	His Hundred Days were the ultimate comeback attempt.
a Napoleon complex	an informal (and unfair) label for short people seen as aggressive	Blaming his temper on a Napoleon complex is just a stereotype.

Try this: Write three English sentences about a time you or someone you know "met your Waterloo" and then made a comeback. Use at least two phrases from the table, and finish with one sentence explaining what you learned from it.