Downsizing, in the time of Napoleon
A LITTLE MISCONCEPTION ABOUT AN EMPEROR
Nearly 200 years after his death, there are only two things almost everyone knows about Napoleon Bonaparte: he was French and short. Bonaparte was indeed French, but at about 5-foot-7, he was taller than the average Frenchman of the time — and taller, in fact, than modern French president Nicolas Sarkozy.
SO WHY DO WE THINK HE’S EVEN SMALLER?
Because of one of the most successful trolling campaigns of all time. Napoleon hated being depicted as short, and that’s exactly why 19th-century Brits set out to do it as much as possible. The standard explanation for Napoleon’s mistaken shortness is that French inches of the era were slightly longer than those in Britain, so his reported height of 5-foot-2 was mistranslated.
HOW DID THEY TROLL BACK THEN, BEFORE TWITTER?
As is now tradition with leaders who go to war with Britain, Napoleon spent years as a favourite punching bag for British caricaturists. A particularly scatological cartoon from 1798, for instance, showed Napoleon standing pantsless on the French coast and farting out a storm of balloons and guillotines aimed at the English. But the “tiny Napoleon” trope did not start until 1803, says Tim Clayton, a British expert on Napoleonicera propaganda. That was the year that saw the publication of the famed cartoon known as “Maniac ravings or Little Boney in a strong fit.” In it, caricaturist James Gillray portrays a diminutive Bonaparte flipping over furniture in a childish temper tantrum while raving about the “British Parliament” and “London Newspapers!”
SO HE WAS ‘NORMAL’ HEIGHT BEFORE THAT?
Before the circulation of Little Boney, Napoleon “was of normal stature," Clayton noted in an email to the National Post. It is not known whether Gillray invented the “short Napoleon” trope, or borrowed it from anti-Napoleon pamphlets. But regardless, a short-tempered, child-sized Napoleon became the accepted standard for caricatures of the Frenchman.
AND THEN THERE WAS NO TURNING BACK
British readers could soon see a minuscule Napoleon wearing oversized boots and shaking his fist across the Channel; or trying to talk tough beneath an enormous bicorne hat that dwarfed his entire body; or struggling to pull a sword from an unwieldy scabbard that dragged along the ground.
HE TOOK IT WITH MATURITY, SURELY?
Napoleon didn’t like it one bit. During a brief period of Franco-British peace in the early 1800s, the French leader sent a flurry of diplomatic notes across the English Channel demanding Britain censor its press. He even saw his mocking depictions as a “deliberate provocation,” as the historian Frederick Kagan wrote in a 2007 history of Napoleon.
THE CARICATURE THAT ENDED NAPOLEON?
After his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, as Napoleon shuffled around in exile on the South Atlantic island of St. Helena, he seemed to harbour worries the cartoonists might have permanent damaged his carefully cultivated superman image. Before he died, he reportedly said that Gillray "did more than all the armies of Europe to bring me down.”