This morning, a colleague pointed my attention towards an article posted in yesterday’s Huffington Post reporting on a new documentary about that every lunatic’s favorite French emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte.

I can already hear the collective sigh of boredom. ‘There are already a million documentaries about history’s most famous concealer of hands,’ you’re probably all complaining; so who needs another one? I felt pretty much the same… until I quickly read that this particular documentary also happened to boast the startling revelation that Napoleon had a tiny penis, only 1.5 inches long to be precise.

Well, we’ve all heard of ‘short man syndrome’ or, as it is more correctly known, ‘the Napoleon Complex – named after the man himself – which describes a psychological state possessed by (mostly) men who, let’s say, can in no way be described as tall and who compensate for their lack of height by being overly-aggressive and domineering.

Napoleon
Is this how the Napoleonic Wars started?

To be honest, it’s quite insulting, especially if you do happen to be of a smaller stature than most, and in fact the term is often used as an insult. Historians pretty much agree, though, that Napoleon’s height was, actually, basically average for the time.

Still, that never stopped anyone from believing that Napoleon’s need to conquer was born of inadequate length… and, thanks to this new documentary, no one has any reason to. Yes, it’s still insulting, but somehow it seems a lot more plausible that a man in a position of power and influence would attempt to conquer the world to compensate for the size of his diminutive penis.

The question arises, of course, of how anyone actually knows how big Boney’s boner was. It turns out, in a fact rather more disturbing in its implications than the fact that there’s such a thing as small male genitalia, that Napoleon’s penis has been preserved since his death in 1821.

Why anyone thought this would be a good idea is a complete mystery… and leads you to wonder if somewhere out there, in a carefully concealed vault – probably under the Vatican, if Dan Brown has anything to do with it – there is a large, secret collection of historically significant penises. We can only hope that, yes, there is.

We can also probably assume that men like Tony Blair and George W. Bush had theirs removed when they entered office and that’s why they were such a pair of war-hungry fuck-heads.

Anyway, the documentary, part of the Dead Famous DNA series on the UK’s Channel 4, aired on April 2nd and is probably available to watch somewhere online. Like Napoleon’s penis, though, it’ll probably take you a little time to find it.

Comments are closed.