The thing you’d never guess is where Napoleon’s masculinity is being kept today

Bonaparte Napoleon, the “little corporal,” had a meteoric career in Europe ruled by great dynasties: from a simple artillery officer to emperor and the master of a continent almost overnight. When he eventually died in exile, his doctor cut off his manhood, which was measured only recently.

Was Napoleon small?

A common yet false belief is that the French emperor was excessively short. It is said his favourite saying to his insubordinate officers was that they stood a head taller than him, though this could be corrected. In the era of the guillotine, such a statement was easy enough to make.

Yet by the standards of the time Napoleon was not short. In the early 19th century, the average height for men in France was 165 centimetres; the French emperor, at 169 centimetres, stood above that. Today he would be considered short, but back then he was more or less of average height, though his tall, slender-body guards would naturally make the eye compare him with them.

What happened to the imperial penis?

And how do we know Napoleon’s height? At his death, on the island of Saint Helena, his doctor, François Carlo Antommarchi, measured him. The Independent states that his penis was cut off at the same time, in front of 17 witnesses. To whom did it belong? To none other than the funeral director Anges Paul Vignali abbé, whose family it had been passed down for roughly a century. In 1924 it was bought by an American rare-books dealer, a certain A. S. W. Rosenbach, so that it could be displayed in New York in 1927.

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