What Happened To Napoleon's "Boner Part"?

Small. Shrivelled. Separated from its owner. What has been said about Napoleon Bonaparte's penis? And how much of it is true? Dr Zack White joins Kate for this episode to discuss these rumours, and what kind of lover and partner Napoleon really was (hint: not great). Zack is a research fellow at the University of Portsmouth, Chair of the Napoleonic & Revolutionary War Graves Charity, and host of 'The Napoleonic Wars Podcast'. This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:35Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters. Welcome back once again to Betwixter Sheets in your ear holes. And just so you know, as well as getting us in your ear holes, you can now get us in your eye holes as well, because we have set up shop on YouTube. That's right, you can go and actually watch us doing this stuff. But before we go any further, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things and adulty way of covering adult subjects. You should be an adult too. And actually, a serious fair do's warning, because I know that I mess about with a fair do's warning. Today, we are covering the subject of sexual assault, and you just might not want to listen to that today, in which case, get out now while you still can, and we will catch you next time. For everyone else, let's get on with it.

• 1:20Kate Lister?

  Do I have 2,200? 2,200, thank you, madam. 2,400? 2,400 is bid. Looking for 2,600? 2,600, thank you, sir. 2,800? 2,800 pounds is bid. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now approaching the very top of the bidding. Do I have 3,000 pounds? 3,000 pounds, thank you. We are at 3,000 pounds, going once, going twice, and sold at 3,000 pounds. Congratulations to our anonymous bidder. You are now the proud owner of Napoleon Bonaparte's penis.

• 2:12Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixter Sheets, history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. When it comes to famous people, it seems like everybody wants a bit of them. You might be after Marilyn Monroe's lipstick, or maybe Brendan Fraser's old socks. Well, maybe that was just me. And countless churches have got relics that are supposedly bits and bobs of various saints. But an artefact sold at a Parisian auction for $3,000 in 1977 is said to be Napoleon Bonaparte's penis. What a purchase. Today, I'm joined by Dr Zack White to find out if this item was really what it said that it was, how it could have ended up in an auction house in 1977, and quite frankly, whether or not Napoleon deserved to have little Bonaparte cut off.

• 2:57Kate Lister?

  Are you ready? Let's do this.

• 3:05Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome to Betwixter Sheets. It's only Zack White. How are you doing?

• 3:11Speaker 01

  I am very well, Kate. Longtime fan, first time calling in, so I'm looking forward to this.

• 3:16Kate Lister?

  And what an episode to pop your cherry on. Napoleon's dong, Napoleon's willy, Napoleon's penis.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Welcome, listeners, to Napoleon's penis. But is it going to be long enough for a full episode, Kate?

• 3:29Kate Lister?

  Well, that's the myth, isn't it? That's like, we've all heard that, like Napoleon is short, Napoleon had a tiny penis, Napoleon da, da, da, da. We do this weird thing when we've got like, like tyrants, if Napoleon was tyrant, I guess it depends which side you're on. It's not enough that they committed war crimes or like horrendous stuff. We have to make them sexually inept as well. We did it with Hitler. We do it with all kinds of leaders, and we've definitely done it with Napoleon.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Hitler only had one ball, and Napoleon had a micro.

• 4:02Kate Lister?

  A micro penis, right? And then we all go, ha, ha, ha, well, I guess that explains what happened then.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  That explains everything, the Napoleon complex. And this is the point, right? People want to believe it because they feel that it fits with that perception that they have of him. But as we'll discuss, the reality is, is, well, it's hard to get a hand on, put it that way.

• 4:21Kate Lister?

  Oh, gosh, this is going to be terrible for Puns this episode. I can, I can tell right now. All right. I don't think there's going to be anybody listening who doesn't know who Napoleon is. But let's, can I start by asking you the question first of all? Was he as tall or as short as people say? So let's try and get into the, because you mentioned it already, the Napoleon complex.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Sure. So there are a few reasons why people think this. And one of them is basically to do with French inches versus British inches. So Napoleon was five foot six inches and a half, because a half inch matters in these instances. And in terms of the average height for the time, that was literally half an inch above average for your typical soldier during this period. So Napoleon's average height, bang, average. Now, why people think he's small comes from a few different things. One is a confusion over this French inches versus British inches, because in French inches, because French inches are a slightly longer unit of measurement, which people can take to the chat.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  And yeah, so he's five foot two in French inches. So people go, oh, he was 5'2".

• 5:27Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Well, he was, but he wasn't. Now, there's another perception that he's small in relation to all the soldiers standing around him, because he surrounds himself with his own guard, his Imperial Guard. And these guys are meant to be the sort of most hench guys in the French army. There are all kinds of height restrictions and service restrictions that enable you to go and serve in the Imperial Guard. You have to have basically a pedigree in order to get in.

• 5:50Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  And so he's surrounding himself by all of these very tall guys in these ultra tall bear skins to exacerbate that height even further. And so he looks even shorter. But I don't really buy that as the excuse, because there are quite a few people of similar height to Napoleon in his staff, who we don't turn around and go, yeah, but so and so was tiny as well.

• 6:10Kate Lister?

  That's true.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  I don't really buy that one. And I think ultimately, it comes down to British propaganda. Because we have a caricaturist during this period called James Gilray, who's an absolute genius. Folks can Google caricatures like the plum pudding in danger, where you've got William Pitt the Elder, this sort of very emaciated British Prime Minister, sitting there across the table from a teeny tiny Napoleon. And what Napoleon is doing is carving off a slice of this plum pudding labelled Europe. Meanwhile, Pitt, serving as Britain, is literally just carving off half of the entire globe, which I think says, it's kind of a lovely comment in terms of people's priorities. Like Napoleon is focused on the small prize, Britain's focused on the much bigger picture. But because this image is so visceral, it sticks.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  And so all of the caricatures that follow capitalise on this image of a teeny tiny Napoleon throwing tantrums, being very childish. And so it's, it's stuck.

• 7:03Kate Lister?

  And that's why we think of him as small. He was taller than Nelson.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  He was.

• 7:07Kate Lister?

  Nelson was quite, quite petite, if what I've been led to believe is true, about five foot four, five foot three, something like that.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  They'd have got on very well from a vanity perspective, but if they both had Instagram, that'd have been a total nightmare.

• 7:22Kate Lister?

  Can you imagine Napoleon on Instagram? That'd be crazy. All right. So give us a potted history of Napoleon, give us his greatest achievements, why he rose, who was he? If anyone is listening and might not know.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  So Napoleon Bonaparte's born in Corsica in 1769, and he's the son of minor aristocracy, minor nobility. He doesn't really want to be French, and this is one of the big surprises.

• 7:46Kate Lister?

  I didn't know that.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, he doesn't want to be French at all.

• 7:49Kate Lister?

  He's taller than I thought, and he doesn't want to be French. Okay.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  We're blowing people's minds, Kate. What can I say? We could make some dirty jokes about blowing, but we probably won't go there.

• 7:58Kate Lister?

  Well, save it, save it. Oh, we will, we will go there.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  So Corsica has a very strong independence movement, that the Bonaparte family was quite key in, in the early stages. But Napoleon's dad looks at the writing on the wall around the time when Napoleon's born, when Genoa, who owns, is the state that owns Corsica, sells Corsica to the French. So basically, Napoleon is conceived Italian or Genoese. He's born French, and ideologically, he doesn't want to be either. He wants to be Corsican. And this creates quite a bit of a rift in the family, because Napoleon's dad ingratiates himself with the French government, so much so that he's then able to send Napoleon off to military academy under this scheme that the French monarchy has created, where you

• 8:44Speaker 01

  can send your, if you're not particularly wealthy, you can send your son off to be educated and therefore kind of owe the French monarchy, and it kind of builds that, that loyalty. It's quite a savvy little scheme. Napoleon doesn't like any of this. He goes off to military academy as a kid, and he's bullied relentlessly, because he has this thick kind of Corsican accent that he never shakes for the rest of his life. He also is obsessed with this idea of Corsican independence. He idolises a guy called Paoli, who's still a very big figure on Corsica today. If you go to Corsica, you can see statues of Napoleon, but also of Paoli in a Jaxeo. And this creates a situation where he's basically bullied, because everyone's going, why the hell are you banging on? Nobody cares about Corsica. What's wrong with you? Corsica's just like this rock in the Mediterranean somewhere, and nobody gets it.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Ultimately, he's rejected by Paoli, because the Bonaparte family is seen as having kind of cozied up to the French system too much, and so they're outcast, literally have to drop everything, run across the island. And Corsica's mountainous, like, it's, it's not easy to get across the island, so it's one of the other ports. And they have to leave everything behind and sail to the French mainland. And at that point, Napoleon really kind of throws his lot into the idea of being French and trying to make it in France, provide for his family and all the rest of it. And he's quite lucky in the timing, because the French Revolution is really starting to bite at this point. And it's that kind of complete, very radical shift from a time of it being all about your

• 10:10Speaker 01

  aristocratic connections, to it being about your connections within government, but also your capabilities. And so you see a lot of people, a lot of his contemporaries make this meteoric rise up to the rank of general in a very short space of time. So he capitalises on that. He has some very successful campaigns in Italy and in Egypt, and then in 1799, he's part of a coup that topples the French revolutionary government. And over the next five years, through a mixture of political manoeuvring and through referendums, he manages to manoeuvre himself from one of the three consuls he's meant to run the French government to first consul, so it's all about him, which is a bit of a theme.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  To then consul for life and then emperor. So he's gone from, we created this coup as part of the culmination of a revolution that ditched a hereditary monarchy to now replace it with an emperor style government that is a hereditary monarchy.

• 11:07Kate Lister?

  But it's not a king, he's an emperor.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  It's not a king, it's not a king. And the terminology is important, so much so that he described himself as emperor of the French, kind of emphasizing, I'm here because the French people want me to be here. It's, I'm, I'm just serving the people, folks, like I'm.

• 11:21Kate Lister?

  Absolutely, I'm just giving them what they want, absolutely, right?

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Never mind the fact that they cook the books on all of those referendums.

• 11:28Kate Lister?

  Scallywack.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  He is, he is. And then over the next few years, the, the key to Napoleon is twofold, partly his incredible genius with propaganda, the way in which he cultivates his image is second to none. The way he can get inside people's heads, the way he can motivate people, manipulate people to get what he wants is phenomenal. The other thing is that, as most people will know, he is France's greatest military leader, full stop, end of debate.

• 11:53Kate Lister?

  He is, isn't he?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  I won't hear any arguments on it.

• 11:55Kate Lister?

  He is. I recently did an episode with Dan Snow about Nelson and his relationship with Lady Hamilton, and he opened it by saying he thinks Nelson is overrated. And I have to get him back on to explain himself because everyone lost their shit in the comments about that. But I don't think anybody would say that about Napoleon because he was a military genius.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  I still think he's overhyped, so the people are now going to take.

• 12:18Kate Lister?

  Right, Zach, explain yourself.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Okay, so everybody's now going to head to the comments and go, oh, what a surprise, another Brit bashing Napoleon. It's nothing to do with nationality. I do think he's a tool for a variety of reasons that we can talk about in a bit. But why is he overhyped? A lot of people want to pin the genius label on Napoleon because they think that he creates a series of reforms, like the creation of the corps system. He doesn't create the corps system. So the corps system is this idea that rather than having all of your army kind of organised in a single mass of artillery and cavalry and infantry, we're a long way from twixt the sheets right now, but we'll, we'll come back to it, folks. Don't worry, don't worry, we're getting to the sources stuff in a minute. Instead of having a single army that's just artillery, cavalry, infantry, what you do

• 13:04Speaker 01

  is you break it up into a series of sort of self-supporting sections. So you have a corps that has a mixture of artillery and cavalry and infantry. And the idea is that you send each of these armies into enemy country along a different road.

• 13:17Kate Lister?

  Oh, that's clever.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Well, this is the thing. So it's all about kind of fighting a little bit like a spider in a web. And so you can move your armies much faster because it's not just one force all along one road. And if any one of these armies encounters an enemy force, it acts like one of the, the strands in a spider's web because you can make contact, you can start fighting them. Meanwhile, you send the messages saying, I've found the entire enemy army, help! And then literally the cavalry come running over the hill. And this is why people love Napoleon's battles, because they're very seat of the pants. It's all very, you know, you start engaging with a much smaller force. It's all about timing. Is the support going to arrive? Do the reinforcements come at the crucial moment?

• 14:01Speaker 01

  And the system works incredibly well so that actually he is successful. And it's, he doesn't create this corps system. What he does is he implements it better than anyone else has before. And that's why people think he's a genius. He is great, no question, but he's not actually the innovator everyone claims him to be.

• 14:20Kate Lister?

  Interesting, because there's a sort of a tension that's arisen in people that, that study Napoleon, and it's kind of like filtered out into social media where people do takes on it. And you've got this like contrast between, right, the military genius, caveat may not have been as genius as we think he is, but like this military tactician who is, who is very, very, very, very, very, very, very good, we'll give him that, right? But it's kind of contrasted with this very clumsy lover image. And you saw that in the latest Napoleon movie where there's, oh dear Zach's political face.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  I'm triggered, I'm triggered.

• 14:54Kate Lister?

  Because that, was that too much? Yeah, but you did see that, like he's in, they, they've got a few sex scenes with Napoleon, and they can be best be described as like short, brief and perfunctory. Like he doesn't have a reputation in history as being a great lover, great general, great at organising armies, shit at finding the clitoris. Like that's sort of this thing that has arisen. So let's talk a little bit about his sex life. And you can explain along the way why you hate that movie as much as you do.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Oh, that movie, visually great, the sex scenes, like there's nothing to indicate that Napoleon was into farmyard noises. Can I just get that out there? Like the pig grunting, no, we've got no evidence of that. Whining like a dog, no evidence of that. The only dog related thing I can offer you is that the first time Napoleon and Josephine sleep together, which is the night of their wedding, side note, Napoleon makes Josephine wait two hours to get hitched because he's busy planning the military campaign that he's about to disappear off to.

• 15:56Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  So she's got the hump with him. Her pug, her pet dog is on the bed and Napoleon goes, yeah, can you move the dog out of the way? Like I want to get to it. To which Josephine basically says, you can deal with it. It's after the stunt you've just pulled. So Napoleon tries to shuffle the dog out of the way. The dog bites him on the thigh. That's the closest we get to any kind of dog related.

• 16:17Kate Lister?

  Sex stuff.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:19Kate Lister?

  That sounded weird. No, dog noises during sex stuff, yes.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  I don't know if that reassures listeners or not, but.

• 16:27Kate Lister?

  But what we do have is letters that survive from Napoleon to Josephine, his wife. And we have diaries as well. He writes about sexual exploits in his diaries, like I believe if my Napoleon histories. So I don't know anything about the military history, but I can tell you where he lost his virginity. He, he paid a sex worker and you, you have this strange account of what happened of him basically walking up to this young woman and being like, what the hell do you think you're doing? This is terrible. You should be doing something better with your life. Don't come and have sex with me. It's like a weird thing that he's doing. I've never understood that.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  As moves go, I don't really know.

• 17:01Kate Lister?

  Odd, isn't it?

• 17:02Speaker 01

  But also there's this kind of, he despises the profession.

• 17:06Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  And yet all the way through his life, he showers people with gifts, effectively trying to pay for sex or trying to coerce people into sex.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  So he hates it and yet acts very much like a pimp in some cases, or you know, somebody who is very sexually coercive and really not great at seduction. I think he thinks he's a great seducer, but.

• 17:33Kate Lister?

  Yes, he does think that, doesn't he? You can tell that.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think that's a lack of awareness on his part, which is quite a theme actually in the letters that you mentioned, because I think part of the perception that everybody has is sort of Napoleon and Josephine, this great love affair, the ultimate love affair in history. And I, I suspect that part of the issue with why people have got that so wrong, and, and I do think they've got it completely wrong, is that they, the early histories of Napoleon are written in that sort of inverted commas, great men of history style, where they're taking Napoleon the warrior, they're putting him up on a pedestal, and then suddenly they've got these letters that he writes to Josephine where he's got some big feels going on. There's lots.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Such a snide comment, but there, there's lots of kind of outpourings of emotion. I'll give you an example. So this is the 14th of March, 1796. They'd been married maybe a fortnight. He goes, every moment separates me further from you, my beloved, and every moment I have less energy to exist so far from you. You're the constant object of my thoughts. I exhaust my imagination. I think of what you are doing. If I see you unhappy, my heart is torn and grief grows greater. If you are gay and lively amongst your friends, brackets, male and female, I reproach you with having so forgotten the sorrowful separation three days ago, thence you must be fickle and henceforth stirred by no deeper emotion.

• 18:56Kate Lister?

  Oh, bony, oh dear. Can you imagine if he had WhatsApp? Oh, it'd be a nightmare. He'd be a voice noter, wouldn't he?

• 19:04Speaker 01

  He would.

• 19:04Kate Lister?

  He would. You'd have just like voice note, voice note, voice note, voice note in this.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  And every voice note would be a podcast as well.

• 19:10Kate Lister?

  It would be, wouldn't it? And a lot of his letters are like this, like what, what is he based, what's the sort of gist of that, do you reckon that he's saying?

• 19:17Speaker 01

  I think it's a few things. I think it's kind of a love bombing. That's how we would kind of describe it today. Obviously, when people are writing the histories, they don't have this concept, but I think it's quite useful to sort of step back and actually quite unusually sort of use a modern lens of what we actually understand to be a good, healthy relationship to try and reinterpret this in order to look at this power dynamic that's going on here. Because Napoleon is totally unaware. I mean, you heard it in that extract and there are others that I can read to you where it's all about him and at no point has he stopped to think about Josephine's perspective. So Josephine is forced into this relationship. She's not actually even called Josephine. Can we just sort of get that one out there?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Like he just goes and renames his wife because it suits him. Her real name is Marie-Joseph Rose Tache de la Pajerie.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  There is no Josephine in there anywhere.

• 20:11Kate Lister?

  I will call you Josephine for some reason.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  For some reason. He does it with one of his mistresses as well. It's a bit of a-

• 20:18Kate Lister?

  Lovely, isn't he?

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Oh, he's such a delight. That's so romantic. Yeah, no, I don't like your name. I'm going to rename you. Although admittedly, with the mistress who he renames, her first name is Marguerite Josephine. So it does get a little bit awkward.

• 20:34Kate Lister?

  Okay. It's still weird, but I can at least see why he might do that. Just to go, I'm now going to call you Josephine.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  So there's that red flag, and it's a howler of a red flag.

• 20:44Kate Lister?

  Isn't it?

• 20:45Speaker 01

  So Josephine's story is a really tragic one, and it's a story of survival. I could see if I was ranting about how brilliant Josephine is because I think she's totally underplayed.

• 20:54Kate Lister?

  We might have to have you back on to do that in another one because I'm in full agreement with you there. But let's give her a bit of an overview.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  So Josephine has a really horrendous first marriage. She's married to a member of the Bohone family who, very wealthy, it's seen as a good match for her in terms of society. But he couldn't give a toss about his wife and he's busy shagging anyone that moves, frankly. Then the French Revolution comes along. They are aristocrats. Monsieur Bohone ends up being executed. Alexandra loses his head. Josephine is in prison. She very narrowly escapes execution herself. She has two kids via that first marriage. And a lot of her story is about trying to look after her kids. She is fundamentally somebody who prioritises her family above everything else.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  And she's part of that kind of slightly hedonistic lifestyle that happens in the wake of the fall of Robespierre, where suddenly the guillotine is gone and that kind of sense of relief, oh my God, we're going to live life to the full, really comes to the fore. And so she becomes one of the big kind of socialites in the political France. She has this salon. She becomes the mistress of Barat, who's part of the French government. So she's moving in amongst these circles. And then Barat gets bored of her. He finds himself a new mistress and he just goes, I'm not bothering with you anymore, but there's this guy called Napoleon. He's just helped me to quash a coup that's happened. So I'm going to use you as a reward. Why don't you go and marry him, bearing in mind that I'm not going to pay for you anymore.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  So, you know, that there's a nice prospect for you. And what people miss is that, you talked about this on an episode with Dan, actually. There's this perception that Napoleon is the last helicopter out of Saigon for Josephine. It's not the case at all. Actually, Josephine is the one in the big social circles. And so she has got options, but she sort of reluctantly decides to go with this.

• 22:47Kate Lister?

  I wonder why?

• 22:49Speaker 01

  That's the big question, because he's not, he's a crap dancer for a start.

• 22:55Kate Lister?

  Crap lover, it seems as well. All of this, like, I'm going to give you a new name and then I'm going to whinge infernally about myself and my own needs.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  And completely fail to understand why Josephine doesn't reciprocate that as well. Because this is one of the big gripes in his letters is like, so 7th of April, 1796, he writes, "I am not satisfied with your last letter. It is cold as friendship. I have not found the fire which kindles your looks and which I have sometimes fancied I found there." April, so a few weeks later, 1796, "There are many days you do not write. What do you do then?"

• 23:28Kate Lister?

  Fuck off. Oh my God.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 23:32Kate Lister?

  Winjy, winjy. Oh.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  And then you're going to love this one. So November 1796, he's finally getting bored of the fact that Josephine isn't reciprocating this gushy, over the top needy love language. And he goes, "I don't love you anymore. On the contrary, I detest you. You're a vile, mean, beastly slut. You don't write to me at all." I can't think why.

• 24:02Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Zach after this short break.

• 24:12Kate Lister?

  In case you weren't aware, World Mental Health Day takes place in October. And I don't know about you, but I'm taking this as a reminder to practise some proper self-care. Saying no to plans I don't want to go to, guilt-free snacking and Halloween movie marathons. It's also the perfect time to check in with yourself and your mental health. For many, it can mean taking that step and speaking to a professional who can help and guide you through any difficulties you're having. But often when you try to do that, it's still way harder than it should be. A lot of online therapy platforms don't accept insurance at all, which means even during a month focused on mental health, you're stuck paying out of pocket or signing up for an expensive monthly subscription. This is where Rula comes in.

• 24:58Kate Lister?

  They partner with over 120 insurance plans, making the average copay just $15 per session. That's real therapy from licensed professionals at a price that actually makes sense. Because the whole point of World Mental Health Day is making sure people actually get help, not just think about it. And Rula sticks with you throughout your journey, checking in to make sure your care is actually helping you move forward. With World Mental Health Day this October, it's a good reminder that taking care of your mental health can start with one step. Visit rula.com/shets to get started. That's R U L A dot com slash S H E E T S. You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Hi there. I'm Dan, host of Dan Snow's History Podcast. And I can imagine on these dark winter nights, all you're going to do is curl up with a cup of tea and get lost in an amazing story. Well, I can help you with that. Twice a week, I tell you the most dramatic and extraordinary stories from history with details I can guarantee you've never heard before. Feel the frostbite of that grisly failed American invasion of Canada in the dead of winter. Imagine every clash and blow at the Battle of Bosworth. Follow Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of the most powerful women in the medieval world, as she goes on crusade to the Holy Land with 300 handmaidens in tow.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  She leads her own army. Everyone goes gaga for Eleanor.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  And trace the voyage of the first Vikings as they arrive on Iceland's lonely shores. For the best historical stories to get lost in, check out Dan Snow's History.

• 26:53Kate Lister?

  It's just such an insight. It's like beneath all of this bravado and beneath all of this propaganda, beneath this military strategy, there's a real fragility there. Like, he's really angry that she isn't responding to him in the way that he wants to. This is a proper, like, petulant tantrum that Napoleon is throwing. I wonder if this is as well as maybe why we think of him as a little man? Because there's something very weak about this neediness in him of just like, "I don't love you anymore. I hate you. You're not writing me my letters." It's just, it's such an odd juxtaposition.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  There's a petulance there, isn't there? Which you see in some of his diplomatic negotiations. Like, he will throw tantrums as a way of sort of trying to show force. And he'll sort of flip tables and throw crockery into a fireplace just to kind of change the mood and change the dynamic and make people go, what the fuck was that?

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Here we were having a discussion. Yeah, I mean, here we were having a discussion about the future borders of Europe and you're throwing some crockery into a fireplace because I didn't give you that particular slice of a country. You okay, hun?

• 27:57Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah. That's a real are you okay moment, isn't it? Did he ever write to Josephine, "Don't wash"? Because that's another legend that's gone around.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  I think it's total bullshit. I've never been able to find a credible source. It's one of those things, often you see it misquoted. So you see sort of five or six different quotes. And you get this a lot with big figures in history, don't you? Like, lots of apocryphal stuff that people think they said and they never did. I can't find a credible original source for it. It's just one of those things that people assume is true. He does talk a little bit about the idea of giving head. So one of his favourite lines is "a thousand kisses". Almost all of his letters are like a thousand kisses. Variety might be quite nice. Like, I got bored after like the 10th time.

• 28:45Kate Lister?

  A thousand kisses. You would just be there looking at your watch of just like, yep, yep. Can we hurry this up just a little bit, please?

• 28:51Speaker 01

  And I think maybe eventually he got the idea that he might need to change the location of those kisses. Because in one of the instances, he's like, "a thousand kisses on your lips, on your chest, and one lower, much lower." So there you've got this kind of sexting vibe going on. But I think, again, this is one of the things that people miss, is that it's much more lust than love. He's obsessed.

• 29:16Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  And he can't understand why Josephine isn't obsessed. Now, Josephine, meanwhile, has taken up with somebody who's actually like charming and emotionally available and able to kind of please her fundamentally in the form of Hippolyte Charles. So that does exacerbate the situation because she's got this kind of, this guy that everybody wants because Hippolyte Charles is like one of the lookers in Paris during this period. All of Josephine's friends want to bang Hippolyte Charles.

• 29:44Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  And she ends up being the one who seduces him, or he seduces her, depending on how you want to spin it. And whilst all of that's going on, you've got all of these letters pouring in from Napoleon, like, "Why don't you love me?"

• 29:58Speaker 01

  I can't live without you. Like, you've been married less than a month. You've known this woman a matter of weeks. Just calm it down.

• 30:06Kate Lister?

  Rain it in just a little bit, mate, please. But he doesn't, does he? And obviously, you know, we actually could do an entire episode on Josephine, and we should do. But the marriage doesn't, it doesn't work out in the end. She can't give him the children that he wants. And he's having affairs. So we should mention that as well. He does have a series of mistresses.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  So this is a little preview to my rants on Josephine. Everybody bangs on about Josephine's affair with Hippolyte Charles. She has one affair over the course of her marriage. Napoleon, as far as we can make out, has 22 extramarital affairs over the course of his life.

• 30:44Kate Lister?

  He's a busy boy. How did he find time to invade anything?

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Maybe these dalliances didn't last particularly long.

• 30:50Kate Lister?

  Maybe they didn't. Didn't he have a relationship with a woman that also had a relationship with Wellington?

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Yes. So this is Georgina, the lady that I was talking about, Mademoiselle Georges. So Marguerite Josephine Weimar is her name. Now, she's 16 years old when she's summoned to Napoleon. And sure, no doubt, people will head to the chat and go, oh, well, it was a different time. But 16 years old.

• 31:14Kate Lister?

  It was still incredibly young at the time.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Yes, even within the context of the period, it's cringey. And it's quite sinister, actually, how she's summoned to him. Because according to her accounts, when Napoleon's valet turns up and says, look, you're coming with me, the emperor wants to see you, she looks terrified. And the valet says, everything will be all right, but go on looking frightened because he'll like that.

• 31:38Kate Lister?

  Oh, no.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Which is one of a string of small anecdotes that we have that point to that being one of Napoleon's things. So he liked to make Josephine cry as well. He kind of got off on that. He described Josephine as being at her most attractive when she'd just cried, which is something that actually Josephine could play on. So she would sometimes reach for the waterworks to get Napoleon into a place where he would do what she wanted.

• 32:07Kate Lister?

  That is, wow, that is fucked up.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Hmm. What I also find really sinister is how open that comment is. Napoleon's valet knows that about Napoleon.

• 32:17Kate Lister?

  That is, that is really disturbing. Like, we're, you know, into really disturbing territory. But that actually feeds into a wider trope that you see in erotica from this period, which is that rape was very much fetishized, young girls resisting sex. You can see that in the work of the Marquis de Sade. You can see that in the pornographic pamphlets of the time. This idea that, you know, that this, this young girl is gonna basically be attacked. It's right there. So he's doing that as well.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if we have time to talk about Marie Walewski, it's even more overt in her account. But to go back to what you're asking about Wellington and Napoleon. So they have an affair that lasts about two years. The last time they sleep together, actually, Napoleon has what we suspect is an epileptic fit. So Josephine actually hears Mademoiselle Georges screaming, runs in, finds her clutching her bed sheet to herself, and Napoleon convulsing on the floor.

• 33:15Kate Lister?

  Fuck.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's sort of the last incident in their relationship, which might have influenced the comparison that she then makes when she recounts sleeping with Wellington years later. So Duke of Wellington, Britain's leading military figure, I would argue ever, people can argue with me about that in the chat show, whatever, defeats Napoleon at Waterloo, most famously. So whilst Wellington is ambassador in Paris, he ends up having an affair with Mademoiselle Georges. And she later describes Wellington as being, quote, "by far the stronger." She doesn't elaborate as to quite what that means, whether that's Wellington knew what he was doing better, or whether Wellington was physically stronger and could manage better

• 33:59Speaker 01

  positions, or whatever it might have been. But Wellington apparently was better in bed than Napoleon.

• 34:05Kate Lister?

  Well, I mean, he would be if he just, if he didn't have a seizure, I guess. That would be amazing.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Low bar, isn't it?

• 34:11Kate Lister?

  Yeah. So we, actually, we need to talk about Napoleon's penis, because he's putting it around a lot. 22 affairs. He is clearly, I don't know what kind of lover Napoleon would have been. I mean, from his letters, like, someone being willing to give head, I guess that, I guess that's, that's a good thing. But he doesn't seem like a very generous person, does he? Like, at all. It seems like he's a very selfish person who's gonna take exactly what he wants when he wants to do it. And why would the bedroom be any different? What were you saying about the first encounter with, was it his second wife?

• 34:46Speaker 01

  So no, this is with Marie Walewski.

• 34:48Kate Lister?

  Oh, yes.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Who's a leading figure in Polish independence. And this is exceptionally dark. So just a kind of a trigger warning for your listeners here. Because Marie Walewski is basically coerced by her contemporaries into accepting Napoleon's advances. She's not remotely interested. She's basically dangled as a bauble in front of Napoleon because Napoleon takes one look at her and goes, who the hell is she? And at the same time, he's having a lot of conversations with the leading nobles about what the future of an independent Poland might look like at a time when he's negotiating with the Russians are, there's a lot of potential for

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Poland to suddenly regain its national independence. So he tries to get Marie Walewski to come and see him. He talks about attending a ball, but he won't attend if she doesn't go. So there's a lot of kind of very puerile, I'm not going if she's not going, and make her come to me. And time and time again, he uses this line about how he has created the opportunity for a Polish nation. Like, I've done this thing, now give me sex.

• 35:55Kate Lister?

  Oh, God.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Which is something he then repeats during the first encounter, when she's pushed time and time again by even her own husband to, look, this is important for the Polish nation, just go and give him what he wants. So all of these men around her.

• 36:10Kate Lister?

  Literally lie back and think of Poland.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Literally. But even then, she's not interested. She doesn't want any of this. And in the end, Napoleon loses his temper and says, effectively, give me what I want, or I will destroy Poland as easy as I destroy this watch. Takes a watch and hurls it on the floor and stamps on it. She then has a panic attack. She passes out. And when she comes around, she finds Napoleon on top of her.

• 36:40Kate Lister?

  Oh, my God.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:42Kate Lister?

  That's awful.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  In Napoleon's own words, when he's boasting about this to one of his contemporaries, he says, and I quote, "She didn't struggle over much."

• 36:52Kate Lister?

  What a prick. Jeez Louise. Wow, that is some dark shit. All right, okay. So we're getting, we're getting a much rounder picture of the man here, I think. Wow. I don't know why I thought it would be anything other than that, given that he's not a man that's, he's clearly very selfish and very entitled and quite violent. I don't know why I thought it'd be any different, but I'm even shocked myself. Right.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  This is his playbook, right? He's used to summoning people. He's used to using his power and his position. And sure, he tries to sort of shower her with gifts. And at one point, Marie Walewski says, "He treats me like a prostitute," which goes full circle to what we were discussing earlier.

• 37:30Kate Lister?

  Yeah, it does, doesn't it? Very entitled, very, I'm going to get this. And if I don't get it, I'm going to be violent and I'll take things what I want with violent means. Well, he dies. Good. Frankly, a little too late in my liking. But he dies, and then we get a weird story about Napoleon's penis. I'll be back with Zach after this short break.

• 38:06Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right. It took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 38:48Kate Lister?

  What the hell is that story? Because this happens with a few infamous men throughout history. It happened with Rasputin. We've already mentioned Hitler. He's got to have weird penis. Tell us the story about Napoleon's penis, which now, in light of everything that you've said, I can only say good and I hope it's true, quite frankly.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, the trouble is that I'm not buying it.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Which, which is kind of both a literal and a figurative thing because this artefact, shall we call it, was auctioned in Paris in 1977. Went for, I think it was $3,000 and it was bought by the Latimer family. Now, nobody's seen this. Nobody's photographed it. Nobody's filmed it quite where you'd want to. I don't know. But like, if you go on the internet, you can find pictures of what is purported to be Rasputin's penis. So like, this is a bit of a thing. And the story is that at the autopsy, Francesco Antomachi, who's one of the doctors who presides over Napoleon's health, basically snips it off, keeps hold of it for a while and it sort of makes its way down through various sort of shady dealings.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  And it's supposed to be a very, very, very small specimen, 1.5 inches, so 3.5 centimetres.

• 39:55Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  Now, I'm not clear if that's French inches or British inches, but at 1.5, I'm not sure it's making a huge amount of difference.

• 40:00Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Quite frankly.

• 40:01Kate Lister?

  Trying to see if I've got a ruler anywhere. Hang on, hang on, hang on. What did you say that was? 1 point?

• 40:08Speaker 01

  1.5 inches, three and a half centimetres. So micro, teeny tiny.

• 40:13Kate Lister?

  Yeah, that's, that doesn't give you a lot to work with, does it? Okay.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  It doesn't.

• 40:16Kate Lister?

  Yeah. Right, okay.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  But as I say, yeah, I'm, I'm not convinced by it because the, the only thing that you can kind of credit with this is that Antomachi was an anatomist. He absolutely hated Napoleon and Napoleon hated him. Napoleon described him as an ignoramus, a fop and a sneak. He was very inexperienced. He didn't really know what he was doing. He was Corsican, so they should have got on really well, but it just didn't, just didn't gel.

• 40:46Kate Lister?

  Is it plausible that he would have? No, you're shaking your head, right? Okay.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  I, I just, I just don't think so because there are seven other British doctors at the autopsy. The reason being, there's a big argument over what actually kills Napoleon and whether or not the British have basically kept Napoleon in a house in St Helena that is so unsanitary that they sort of ensured that he's contracted TB in a kind of biological assassination. And so there's these big arguments about, no, we need to weigh Napoleon's liver properly to see if he's like got hepatitis. In the end, what actually kills him, if people care, is he's got catastrophic stomach cancer. There's basically nothing left of the stomach. It's just kind of turned into one massive tumour and it causes an esophageal tear. So it's a very, very unpleasant way to go.

• 41:30Kate Lister?

  Good.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Which, given what we've discussed earlier, like.

• 41:34Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  So somebody would have noticed if you're just going to kind of casually take the bone out of bone apart, you know?

• 41:42Kate Lister?

  I mean, they would do it. So the story, so that's the story, that during the autopsy, a Corsican anatomist who didn't like Napoleon sliced it off and pocketed it for some reason.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  And somehow nobody noticed.

• 41:53Kate Lister?

  And nobody noticed.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  What the hell do you think you're doing? Put that back.

• 41:56Kate Lister?

  And he didn't make it into any of the notes or any of the accounts of the story. Nobody, no, that's not going to happen, is it? It's just not.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  It's just not. It's just too implausible. You've got too many people who've got to acquiesce in the face of that bullshit.

• 42:10Kate Lister?

  And like, and they are there to document his body and record his body in minute detail.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  And can you imagine the fuss that would have been kicked up if they'd literally emasculated France's greatest military hero?

• 42:24Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  It's not going to be kept quiet. It's going to be, it's a diplomatic incident. It's penis gate.

• 42:32Kate Lister?

  But the story, where, where did the story even come from?

• 42:35Speaker 01

  It's, it's part of the provenance, inverted commas, of this artefact.

• 42:38Kate Lister?

  Oh, so the artefact does exist then? That it does an actual thing floating around somewhere that purports to be Napoleon's penis?

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there is a, a specimen.

• 42:47Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  That is 1.5 in length that people then claim is Napoleon's penis. But like I say, it hasn't been photographed, it hasn't been filmed. It's, we, all we've got is this record at the auction in, in 1977 and that's it.

• 43:02Kate Lister?

  Never been tested, never been subjected to any kind of scrutiny or anything.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  No, it's not like Rasputin's penis where they tested one and found it was a sea cucumber.

• 43:12Kate Lister?

  Well, probably because it would turn out to be something else, wouldn't it? It's clearly, it's not his.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  Or something like, it's, it's, is it even human? Like, we don't know. The other thing is that when they exhume him to take him back to Paris so that he can be buried in Leontlie, so he's buried on St Helena initially, then they bring him back in 1840. And when they exhume him, they find his body, quote, "in a near perfect state of preservation" when they open up the coffin. And I kind of imagine that, I'm not saying that somebody went and checked. I'm not sure that was kind of the top of the agenda, but as you're preparing that body for transportation, you can imagine somebody might have just kind of changed the clothing because he was buried in, in an Imperial Garz uniform.

• 43:52Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  They might have just kind of taken the clothes off, maybe put fresh clothes on. Somebody would have kind of noticed this somewhere along the way. So you put it all together and it's, it's probably not his.

• 44:03Kate Lister?

  It's just not plausible, is it? It's not plausible at all. But what do you think that it says? Like, we've got this, like this mythology about Napoleon and we've even got a complex named after him, the Napoleon complex, which as it turns out is completely misnamed because he was actually of above average height and we have no idea what his penis looked like at all.

• 44:27Kate Lister?

  What do you think that says about us and our relationship to Napoleon that we, do you think it's like, is it a distinctly British thing? Do they do this in France as well? Or is it just a British thing that we're like, ha, ha, he had a tiny penis and he was tiny and he was a little man? Ha, ha, ha.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  And we won.

• 44:42Kate Lister?

  And we won.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  That's, that's what it comes down to. And there's great work that's been done on the way in which Wellington defeating Napoleon at Waterloo becomes this kind of bedrock of how Britain sees itself going into the 19th century. And I think it's very much tied up in that. If you look at the work of people like Linda Colley, who's talking about how British identity forms, she talks about how for Britain during a lot of the 18th and 19th century, being British just means not being French. Then Waterloo comes along and that very quickly turns from the British with their Dutch allies and the Hanoverian allies and their Prussian allies beat Napoleon to Wellington and the British beat Napoleon.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Wellington buys into that in quite a big way.

• 45:29Kate Lister?

  Of course.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  And it sort of makes himself the darling of both Europe and the nation. And so Britain kind of creates this shorthand of, you know, our guy Wellington, who apparently is better in bed than Napoleon anyway, as a sort of footnote, beats the best military general of the age at Waterloo, we'll just ignore the Prussians and Marshal Bluka. And, you know, so Britain can kind of dine out on this for the course of the next century of, ha, ha, we were better than the French, we bested them at Waterloo, we bested all of Napoleon's subordinates, our guy Wellington bested Napoleon and bested him in the bedroom. And Napoleon was a small guy and he lost and he created this massive empire. Why did he create this massive empire? Probably because he was small and he was compensating. Oh, so he probably had a small penis. Oh, and now we've got this artefact that's 1.5 inches.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  It's probably Napoleon's penis, isn't it? And so all of these contractions and shorthands come together to create this sense that, yeah, he probably did, didn't he? He probably did have a micro penis.

• 46:25Kate Lister?

  Just makes sense. Like this idea that the entire Napoleonic Wars and all of it was just massive overcompensation. That suddenly some, so I guess maybe that says something about masculinity as well? The idea that that on some level seemed credible to us, like he has a small penis, of course he invaded Prussia. That makes perfect sense now.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Takes us back to the Napoleon movie, doesn't it? You know, the entirety of the Napoleonic Wars is basically about trying to impress Josephine and get into Josephine's bed, which is kind of the subtext to the Napoleon movie plot.

• 46:55Kate Lister?

  Yeah. Oh, Zach, you have been marvellous to talk to. Thank you so much. If people want to know more about you and your work, if they need to find you to say their own piece about Wellington and Napoleon, where can they find you?

• 47:06Speaker 01

  If they want to come and give me abuse about the size of Napoleon's penis, they can find me. I have a show called The Napoleonic Wars Podcast, which you can get wherever you find your podcasts.

• 47:16Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much. You have been spectacular. Will you come back again to talk to us about Josephine?

• 47:20Speaker 01

  Oh, twist my arm, it'd be a delight.

• 47:23Kate Lister?

  Fabulous. Thank you so much.

• 47:27Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening. Thank you so much to Zach for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like with you and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just fancied saying hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again at Betwixt's Sheets, History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.