When it comes to Napoleon and insanity, there are two common well-springs in popular culture that delve into the Emperor. These two tropes of madness at times overlap, but also have their roots in the nineteenth century.

The first madness trope is related to Napoleon's aggressiveness and his short stature. There is no shortage of popular depictions of Napoleon as an arrogant bully whose pugnaciousness is not matched by his height. Bugs Bunny faced off against Napoleon in the short Napoleon Bunny-Part introduces Napoleon planning a conquest of the British isles before he violently orders to have Bugs killed as a spy. The 2000 film Quills has the conservative and stuffy Napoleon instigate the investigation into the Charenton asylum for allowing de Sade too much leeway in his care. Napoleon not only looks small in his imperial regalia, but at one point in the film, sits in his throne with his feet unable to reach the ground. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure avoids the cheap humor of a short Napoleon, but portrays him cheating at bowling, throwing tantrums, and being a total choad. The short-lived MTV cartoon Clone High was not above making short jokes, and its clone of Napoleon is a bully of a manager at T.G.I. Chili's. Ian Fleming's Goldfinger tacked to a more serious take on the relationship between height and aggressiveness, with this passage:

Bond always mistrusted short men. They grew up from childhood with an inferiority complex. All their lives they would strive to be big — bigger than the others who had teased them as a child. Napoleon had been short, and Hitler. It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world.

So this image of Napoleon is one in which there is a direct relationship between his height and shortness.

Of course, Napoleon was not all that short. He was never going to be a center for a time-travelling NBA, but he was about average height for Frenchmen of his era. One of the reasons why it became enduring that he was short was that British caricatures of Napoleon almost invariably cast him as diminutive stature, often wearing boots and a hat too big for such a man. Take for example, this famous cartoon by James Gillray or this Cruikshank cartoon where Napoleon is a badminton shuttlecock for the Austrian Schwarzenburg and the Prussian general Blücher. Other British caricatures would contrast the miniature Napoleon with a the tall, straight as an arrow Englishman, such as this Gillray piece.

These British depictions of Napoleon helped to cement an image of the Emperor for the Anglophone world. Artists like Gillray and Cruikshank were among charter generation for the modern political cartoon, and they had a chance to set the tone for later visual depictions of Napoleon. The figure of Napoleon is invariably short, ill-tempered, and always spoiling for a fight he will lose. One of the illustrations for the 1851 novel Vanity Fair depicts its anti-heroine Becky Sharp as a Napoleon who cares little for conventional social norms in her preening ambition. Later British depictions of Napoleon or analogies to Napoleon in the Victorian era such as Holmes's nemesis Moriarty would highlight to Napoleon's overweening ambition. Pace Fleming, shortness is not always present in these depictions, but it not wholly absent either. But there is something to depicting a preternaturally short Napoleon as pathologically violent and prone to poor impulse control within popular culture.

The second trope associating Napoleon and madness is that of the crazed man (or occasional woman or male bending unit) that believes themselves to be Napoleon. As with Napoleon's shortness, this is a common trope within fiction. Laurel and Hardy produced a short on a man who thinks he is Napoleon after being hit by a dense biography of the Emperor. Napoleon Bunny-Part ends with the Emperor being carted off by the asylum orderlies as the "twelfth" Napoleon today and a cross-eyed Bugs claiming to be Napoleon while putting on a bicorne and imitating Napoleon's famous hand gesture. The American sitcom Night Court used Napoleon as a running joke in the episode "I'm OK, You're Catatonic-Schizophrenic" where a gaggle of Emperors go outside for a smoke break and Judge Stone later put in a holding cell with "the little generals" where they grunt angrily at mentions of Russia. Documentatarian Werner Herzog used the example of Napoleon imposture in his documentary The Far End of the World when he asked a biologist the question "can a penguin go insane?". The VERY NSFW 1976 classic porn film The Opening of Misty Beethoven again NSFW link introduced the titular prostitute servicing a man dressed as Napoleon (for the prurient minded, the NSFW scene starts at around 3:00 in the link). The novel The Death of Napoleon, adapted into the 2001 film The Emperor's New Clothes, features an escaped Napoleon finally coming to terms with his destructive role in Europe by visiting a madhouse filled with claimants to his throne and persona.

So the idea of Napoleon imposture runs the gamut of family-friendly entertainment to semi-avant-garde pornography. Again, this trope has a good deal of its origins in the nineteenth century and there were more than a few individuals claiming to be Napoleon. Laure Murat's study of madness found that Charenton in 1818 that while there was one Bourbon claimant, there were five Napoleons. The return of Napoleon's body in 1840 as well as the Second Empire increased the number of claimants. Such delusional imposture is nothing new, but the period after Napoleon's reign overlapped with both an ever-increasing spread of mass media as well as greater professionalization of mental health care. This not only widened the scale of potential would-be Napoleons, but also discussions about them.

Murat persuasively argues that one of the reasons Napoleon figured so heavily in nineteenth-century imposture was that Napoleon's own image of a self-made man of genius meshed well with delusions of grandeur. The historical Napoleon reinforced the delusional ones because the Emperor had cultivated his own symbology that a claimant could imitate. Napoleon, Murat asserts, composed and constructed a good deal of his life, blurring the line of Napoleon the man with Napoleon the legend in a way that was not to dissimilar to latter Napoleons.

This speculation on the part of Murat does help explain some of the twentieth century's depictions of Napoleon imposture. There is a certain comedic jest to posing as a Napoleon inside areas that are decidedly unimperial like a NYC holding cell or a porno theater. Yet there is an alternative, complementary, hypothesis as to why Napoleon is one of the go-to figures for historical imposture. Napoleon is safe while still being one of the most recognizable historical figures. Unlike other dictators of the modern era such as Hitler, Napoleon did not leave a legacy of genocide or problematic politics. Napoleon is close enough to the contemporary era to be recognizable, but distant enough so that this joke is less offensive. The markers for Napoleon's image- the bicorne hat or the hand inside the shirt- are also easy to replicate. Someone deluded into thinking they are Hitler would be tragic, but with Napoleon it can be farce.

Sources

Alexander, R.S. Napoleon. London: Arnold, 2001.

Murat, Laure. The man who thought he was Napoleon: toward a political history of madness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.