Sunny clear day on the fifteenth of August 1769 in history is known as the birthday of the most famous person in Europe - Napoleon Bonaparte. The boy was the second in a family belonging to an ancient but not rich family, however, his tremendous perseverance and determination made him one of the greatest commanders in the world.
Bonaparte’s triumphal path is well known: he was the first French consul, then emperor of France, led the brilliant military campaigns that turned his mighty empire into one of the most powerful powers in Europe. Then there was a campaign against Russia, complete collapse, abdication, and at the end - death on St. Helena.
The name of this person has always been associated with many legends and rumors, some of which are already so rooted in human minds that they began to be perceived as reality. And oddly enough it sounds, but the growth of Napoleon Bonaparte, always considered very small, also relates more to the field of rumors than to reality.
His name is often taken as an example of the human "low" syndrome, when people are credited with aggressiveness as a compensation for this lack of addition.
It was traditionally believed that Napoleon Bonaparte's growth barely reached 156 centimeters, but this is at least strange, because his contemporaries never called him stunted. Moreover, many sources speak of him as an emperor with a height of 165 centimeters.
Then where does the legend "Napoleon Bonaparte's short stature" come from? Many researchers believe that the reason for this is his nickname.
It is known that Napoleon was called "Little Corporal", and the reason for this is not short stature, but imbalances in the figure. The emperor had a disproportionately large head, striking in his intravital images. And it is likely that the "Little Corporal" he was nicknamed precisely because of the apparent fragility of the figure in combination with youth. After all, Napoleon was already a general at twenty-six. And it so happened that he was surrounded mainly by fairly tall people, against which he really looked small, besides he did nothing to look taller: he did not wear high-heeled boots that were fashionable at that time or hats with magnificent plume. He basically wanted to be perceived by just such a person as the soldiers fell in love with him.
The riddle of his short stature was solved recently. It turns out that after death they measured the growth of Napoleon Bonaparte, they got five feet two inches and four lines. Later, when translating this value into centimeters, scientists focused not on the French foot, which was in effect in those years, but on English. Hence the difference. And based on the table of European feet, presented in the encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron, we can see that they are really different.
Consequently, Napoleon's height after death was approximately one meter 69 centimeters, and despite the fact that he was already a rather decrepit old man. Hence the conclusion: in his youth, the French emperor was a man of medium build, and not at all a short man.
Therefore, the centuries-old opinion that Bonaparte was a very small “fat man” is a fallacy.