this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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I don't quite get it. Apparently, Napoleon's height was ridiculed and used for english propaganda, but I often hear that actually, he wasn't a small person. I looked it up, wikipedia says he was 1.68 m. That's damn short though.
Average height has increased over time.
No, not always. There were fluctuations depending on several factors, nutrition being one (and an important one).
Still, 1.68 seems just tiny ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
1.68m is 5'5" which is yeah short but not too far from the (self-reported) average male height in France today which is 5'9" (1.75m) (Bayesian estimates actually say 5'7" (1.70m)). During Bonaparte's time average male height in France was 5'4" (1.62m) so he was actually taller than average by a tiny bit.
I cannot relate to feet and inches for height, I'm all but used to imperial units.
All I am saying though is that 1.68 is very small from my perspective and if that's the average height back around 1800, people where tiny then.
I edited my post to include metric units for those numbers.
And sure, it's fine to say that is short from your own personal perspective but yes statistically the average height was less back then. Even so the average height today is only about 10 cm more.
You may just be taller than average if you are that incredulous about his height. I don't consider 5'5" (1.68 m) to be that far off from the average height of men in most countries today. If he were under say 5' (1.52 m) I would say that is significantly shorter.
You're taking this far more serious than I do.
Also, ten centimetres are a lot in height difference.