5 WTF Facts About Napoleon Hiding in Plain Sight on His Wikipedia Page

5 Napoleon Sold America a Ticking Time Bomb

The territory of the Louisiana Purchase was a bargaining chip that the French had alternately won and lost a few times over the course of the 18th century. Napoleon was forced to sell it so he could focus on more pressing revolutions closer to home. Or did he perhaps hand it over to Thomas Jefferson as part of a larger diabolical scheme?!

Thomas Jefferson nabbed the 828,000 square miles for the bargain basement price of $15 million. Along with lots of lucrative ports, the territory came with a massive underground volcano that could erupt at any moment. The Yellowstone Supervolcano is a 43-mile-by-28-mile caldera below Yellowstone National Park that erupts roughly every 600,000 years, and is about 40,000 years overdue. A full-on eruption would vaporize the surrounding area like a nuclear bomb, and would cover much of the Northern Hemisphere in ash for months, even years. A truly catastrophic event on a global scale.

Did Napoleon purposely Trojan Horse this sleeping giant into the open arms of his foe? He’s dead, so we can’t ask him.

4 He Had a ‘Mixed Record on Civil Rights’

Look, it’s been a while since I took a class on European history. Maybe this guy did some good stuff I forgot about! Sure, he was a ruthless military genius, but he also took power away from crazed religious extremists, and even created a pretty dope public school system! He was a product of his time, but maybe he wasn’t so bad after all!

Let’s see what Wikipedia considers to be a “mixed record on civil rights”:

• Abolished the free press
• Ended directly elected representative government
• Exiled and jailed critics of his regime
• Reinstated slavery in France's colonies 
• Banned the entry of Blacks and mulattos into France
• Reduced the civil rights of women and children 
• Reintroduced a hereditary monarchy 
• Violently repressed popular uprisings against his rule

That’s a “mixed record” in the same way a Gatorade jug of jungle juice at a state school frat party is a “mixed drink.” The big man slopped together all the most toxic ingredients he could find at the 24-hour despot store, and forced his guests to slurp it up.

3 He Took a Summer Off of Warring to Write Smutty Literature

In 1794, at the age of 25, Napoleon had worked his way up to Artillery Commander of the Army of Italy. I’m not well-versed in 18th-century European military hierarchies, but it sounds more impressive than the title of “operations coordinator” I had when I was 25. But like any young gun climbing the corporate ladder, Napoleon was dealt a professional setback. That same year, he was assigned to serve as infantry command in another army, this one fighting a boring civil war. Wikipedia assures me this was a demotion.

So what’s an eager young warmonger to do? Napoleon called in sick, and worked on his romance novel. He’d been hooking up with his brother’s wife’s sister, Désirée Clary, so he pretended he was too ill to fight, and spent a few months smooching (and writing about said smooching). Clisson et Eugénie is understood to be a one-to-one retelling of his summer of love.

2 The Dude Was a Flip-Flopper of the Highest Order

Remember that scene from The Mummy where that mustachioed weenie-man bumps into a hungry, half-fleshed Imhotep? He cycles through a whole carabiner of religious symbols, and cynically prays to each god in turn. That was Napoleon’s approach to global conquest. In his own words: “It was by making myself a Catholic that I won the war in the Vendée, by making myself a Moslem that I established myself in Egypt, by making myself an ultramontane that I turned men’s hearts towards me in Italy. If I were to govern a nation of Jews I would rebuild the Temple of Solomon.”

It’s hard to know what his actual beliefs were. The Pope forced him to make one of his marriages a private religious ceremony, but later excommunicated him. He was also super into Islam, the Quran and once publicly defended Muhammad. I’m tempted to say he was open-minded, but it’s more likely he was just constantly hedging his bets.

1 ‘Napoleon’s Penis Was Allegedly Removed’

Napoleon’s hog has been through so many posthumous adventures that it has its own Wikipedia page. It’s alleged that, during one of his several autopsies, a chaplain bribed a physician to snip off Napoleon’s bone part. As the story goes, Napoleon had called the guy “impotent,” and he’d vowed revenge. 

There’s an actual hunk of mummy meat that’s allegedly Napoleon’s royal pecker, and it’s traversed the globe many times over, being bought and sold by various collectors and exhibitions. It currently resides in the private collection of a New Jersey urologist. Collectors have offered $100,000 for it, if you’re wondering what the going rate is.

Napoleon’s dongle has been described by those who have seen it as a “piece of leather or a small, shriveled eel,” a “maltreated strip of buckskin shoelace,” “barely recognizable as a human body part” and “very small.” Wikipedia helpfully notes that “it is not known what size it was during Napoleon's lifetime.”