Napoleon is a fictional character and the main antagonist of George Orwell's 1945 novella Animal Farm.

[2] While he is at first a common farm pig, he exiles Snowball, another pig, who is his rival for power, and then takes advantage of the animals' uprising against their masters to eventually become the tyrannical "President" of Animal Farm, which he turns into a dictatorship, eventually becoming every bit as openly cruel as its original human owner and being perceived as physically indistinguishable from a human at the very end of the story.

Napoleon later makes a deal with Frederick (similar to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact shortly before World War II).

Napoleon spends most of his time inside, giving his orders through other pigs, like the cunning orator Squealer, who helps spread support for him and changes the commandments.

During his time in power, he also, through Squealer, secretly changes the Seven Commandments' prohibition against killing, drinking, and sleeping in beds, allowing his followers and him to break the original commandments, because the other animals (except for Benjamin, the cynical donkey) are not clever enough to notice, or they blame their own memories if they think they have noticed.

The pigs start walking on their hind legs, drinking alcohol, wearing clothes, and carrying whips near the end of the book.

The live-action version, meanwhile, ends with its protagonists successfully fleeing the farm after seeing a musical propaganda film portraying Napoleon as standing on two legs, and later returning after he has seemingly died and his dictatorship collapsed under vague circumstances, mirroring the real-life fall of the Soviet Union.