Margen
His autopsy report, in 1821, recorded Napoleon at 'five feet two inches'. The detail almost everyone missed: those were French feet, longer than English ones. Converted, he stood around 1.69 m (5 ft 6 in) — average, or slightly above, for a Frenchman of his time.
The myth was manufactured mostly by British caricaturists. For years James Gillray drew him as 'Little Boney', a furious child in enormous boots, and that image crossed Europe faster than his armies. His own escort did the rest: the grenadiers of the Imperial Guard had to meet a minimum height and wore bearskin caps nearly half a metre tall. Surrounded by hand-picked giants, anyone looks small.
Two centuries on, we still call the urge to compensate for being short a 'Napoleon complex'. In other words: we named a complex after a man of perfectly normal height. Propaganda, when it works, doesn't last years. It lasts centuries.