Napoleon Bonaparte: A Short Dictator?

That depends on how you measure him!

There is a general belief that Napoleon Bonaparte was unusually short, and that he is therefore part of the common perception that dictators tend to be short people who make up for it by being particularly unpleasant to everybody else and conquering as many countries as they can. But, in Napoleon’s case, is this true?

Short dictators

Dictators are short people, aren’t they? Joseph Stalin was 5 foot 5 inches, as was Vladimir Lenin. Mussolini was 5 foot 6, Adolf Hitler was 5 foot 8 (not particularly short, but only average for a German of his time) and Kim Jong Il was a mere 5 foot 3 (perhaps an unfair comparison, given that Koreans are not particularly tall people anyway).

By contrast, democratic western leaders are tall and well-built, and thus so assured of their stature that they don’t have to get nasty and start invading their neighbours just to get their own back on the unfairness of life. Hence you have General de Gaulle at 6 foot 5, Abraham Lincoln at 6 foot 4 and F D Roosevelt at 6 foot 2.

However, the many exceptions to these trends would seem to cast a dampener on the general theory. There have been many tall dictators, including Fidel Castro at 6 foot 3, Saddam Hussein at 6 foot 2 and Idi Amin at 6 foot 4…