Was Napoleon short?
No! “Le Petit Caporal” wasn’t petite—at least not by 19th-century standards. The estimated average height of a French man in 1820 was 5 feet 4 inches (about 1.65 meters). At the time of his death in 1821, Napoleon measured about 5 feet 7 inches (roughly 1.68 meters) tall, meaning that he was actually of above-average height.
Napoleon’s many reforms left a lasting mark on the institutions of France and of much of western Europe. But his driving passion was the military expansion of French dominion, and, though at his fall he left France little larger than it had been at the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he was almost unanimously revered during his lifetime and until the end of the Second Empire under his nephew Napoleon III as one of history’s great heroes.