Napoleon complex
Napoleon complex is a term to shame short men for not acting like a jester or punching bag like people want them to be. The name of the complex stems from the belief that Napoleon Bonaparte's efforts to conquer and ensure French supremacy and dominion over Europe were an attempt to overcompensate for his supposedly diminutive physical stature.
This is despite the fact that his alleged manletism for the era in which he lived (he was 5'7" by some measures, around average height at the time in France, but that stature would possibly be considered a manlet-tier height among the better nourished French nobility) has been claimed to stem from British propaganda, that was based on a false conversion of his height (based on the measures used in France at the time, to the imperial system), that portrayed him as a comical, overcompensating manlet. During his exile on the South Atlantic island of St Helena, the British physicians who measured his height claimed he was 5'2".
The misperception of his height could also have been caused by the fact that his beloved Garde Impériale had very strict height requirements for the time, with the average Imperial Guardsman being 5'11 (180 cm). This meant that he was frequently a victim of heightmogging.
Research[edit | edit source]
Researchers from the University of Central Lancashire[1] conducting an experiment for the BBC found taller men were more likely to lose their temper.
Men of different heights (ten men of 'average height' and ten men 5' 5" or below) duelled with wooden sticks but one of the subjects deliberately provoked the other by rapping them across the knuckles. The research was designed to test Short Man Syndrome - or Napoleon complex - the theory that shorter men are more aggressive to dominate those who are taller than them. Heart monitors revealed it was the taller men who flew off the handle more quickly and hit back.