THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT (JUST LIKE THE LONG WAR):

The former leftist French presidential candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, called it "propaganda against the people, the people who are [portrayed as] barbarians, bloodthirsty savages," while the "cretin" that is Marie-Antoinette and the "treacherous" Louis XVI are portrayed as noble victims. "The denigration of the great Revolution is a dirty job to instill more self-loathing and déclinisme in the French," he told Le Figaro (link in French). The secretary general of the Left Front, Alexis Corbière, said on his blog (link in French):

To all those who will buy Assassin's Creed: Unity, I wish them a good time, but I also tell them that the pleasure of playing does not stop you from thinking. Play, yes, but do not let yourself be manipulated by those who make propaganda.

Ubisoft, the maker of the Assassin's Creed series of video games, which has been going since 2007 and has sold more than 70 million copies, is in fact French. One of the makers of the game replied (link in French) that Assassin's Creed: Unity is a "consumer video game, not a history lesson" but did say that his team hired a historian and specialists on the Terror and other aspects of the Revolution. Le Monde lays out seven errors in the game here (in French).

The debate over who are the heroes and villains of the Revolution goes back to the 1790s.

In fact, the debate over who are the heroes and villains of the Revolution goes back to the 1790s. British counter-revolutionary thought often focused on the suffering of the monarchy in their stories, such as the King's tearful goodbye to his family before his execution on Jan. 21st, 1793 or Marie-Antoinette's perhaps apocryphal last words to her executioner after stepping on his foot just before her head was cut off: "Pardon me sir. I did not mean to do it."

Like the video game, many scholars also focus on the revolutionaries' violence. "Bloodshed was not the unfortunate by-product of revolution, it was the source of its energy," the historian Simon Schama wrote in his book Citizens (paywall), published in 1989 to mark the bicentennial of the French Revolution, which he said depended "on organized killing to accomplish political ends."

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