Disclaimers: Let me start by saying that assessing the question of whether propagandistic material aimed at altering French identity has proliferated in recent years is beyond the scope of this subreddit, as we'd be discussing events younger than two-decades-old. I should also take this time to mention that I haven't finished the game yet, so I can't address events in the plot beyond a certain point.

Let me begin by giving a brief "the story so far" regarding Assassin's Creed for any French Revolution scholars who might read this but haven't played the game. The Assassin's Creed series follows a hidden conflict between two groups that have ostensibly operated in the shadows since the beginning of human history: the Assassins and the Templars. Without wishing to get too far into it, in the overarching backstory humanity is a former slave race of a progenitor species that died out before our recorded history began; the Assassins wish to use the legacy of our creators to ensure absolute freedom for all, the Templars want to use it to restore the absolutist "utopian" order to human-kind that we "enjoyed" while slaves to our creators. Most of the games center around using the genetic memories (I know, a soft-science nightmare) of the protagonist to explore the life of one of their ancestors, usually to find some piece of this progenitor technology that had been hidden some time during the events covered. This should give you some idea of the level of historical accuracy that one can expect off the bat.

So how accurate is the portrayal of the revolution? Well, it's a mixed bag, but I think we can usefully divide this answer into "passive portrayal" and "active portrayal." In terms of passive portrayal, which is to say the visual representation of Paris in the 1790s and the activities of crowds on the street (as opposed to the "active" portrayal presented by named characters with dialog), things look pretty good. Playing it I've been impressed with how much the city looks like the descriptions I've always read, I've been impressed with how good the clothes look, and in general with the generally life-like depiction of Parisian life. More impressive, and to my mind illuminating, is the depiction of crowds, the behavior of crowds, and the general integration of revolutionary activity into the daily street life of Paris. I'm an economic and political historian, though, and not a cultural one, so the possibility exists that the game is riddled with subtle inaccuracies that I'm simply not equipped to perceive.

Let's talk about the politics, and the "active" portrayal of the Revolution. The truth is that the French Revolution did have a huge amount of horrific violence on the part of the revolutionaries, but we should also note that the nobility weren't exactly the most delightful people either. That said, thinking of the revolutionaries as bloodthirsty, mindless killers is wrong as well. While we have episodes in the cultural memory of events like the death of Princess Marie Louise Therese (what actually happened isn't totally clear, but the most popular story is that after she was beheaded her body was mutilated and her head placed on a pike and paraded beneath the window of her close friend Marie Antoinette), there's a reason why the French Revolution is regarded as, among other things, being a superior case for studying the politics of group violence and the psychology of crowds; the violence of the Revolution is best regarded as mostly hysterical acts of a public freed of the constraints of the normal social order. Most of the evidence available suggests that the Revolutionaries were just people, frightened and angry, caught up in the madness that our species seems to suffer from when too many of us gather in one place, rather than monsters who took some special pleasure in beheading the king and his family.

Off the bat, I'm inclined to agree with the pundits. All of the nobility I've met so far have appeared to be, at worst, fops (with the exception of the Marquis de Sade). On the other hand, we have examples of named revolutionaries like Sivert (at best an ugly, uncultured thug and betrayer) and La Touche (who is straight-up a monster). These men aren't otherwise good people caught up in revolutionary fervor, or even really bad men who've slipped the leash due to the breakdown in normative social order; they're cartoon villains, engaging in ostentatious evil. Now, you could say that these characters are also Templars, but we also see noblemen who are Templars, don't we? And those Templars in general seem to be much more sympathetic, like de la Serre. I actually haven't met the King of France, yet, so I'm really not sure how he's portrayed. Given the villains that are lined up against him, and the series' penchant for good men brought low by evil men, I can guess how he'll appear.

Let's pull back, a little, and examine Assassin's Creed as a whole for it's historiographic value. On the one hand, the writers have always been pretty good at weaving the actions of the protagonists pretty deftly between the important historical events being portrayed in the game, which in previous installments have often done a good job of seeming morally ambiguous. On the other hand, we're talking about a series of stories in which the Templars are responsible for arranging pretty much every single violent conflict in human history (I recently learned from the wiki that apparently most of the events of the Cold War were the Templar's doing, for instance) with the goal of controlling humanity through ancient technology. The point of all of this is that I'm prepared to suggest that rather than being propaganda, the portrayal of the French Revolution in AC: Unity is bad writing. If the Templars have to be behind the Revolution (as they are behind everything), and the Templars are cartoon villains (which they sure are), then obviously the Revolutionaries are going to fall into one of two categories: dupes, or moustache-twirlers.

I'm not totally sure how to add citations to my discussion of a videogame, but some good books to read about the French Revolution that would help you contextualize its portrayal in Assassin's Creed, try The Great Cat Massacre (Darnton), Peasants into Frenchmen (Weber). The Great Cat Massacre is an especially good one, as it deals with how acts of violence that we would otherwise find abhorrent become normalized in the kind of environment that produced the French Revolution.

TL;DR: While most of the main events from history are present in the plot, you don't need to know much about the history of the French Revolution to see that the Revolutionaries are often being portrayed as cartoonishly evil.

Wow is that ever complicated. I should preface this by saying I haven't played the game yet. I game on a PC and, by all accounts, I need to wait for Ubisoft to issue some patches before I bother to install it.

That said, the French Revolution exists in several phases. The first phase is primarily political and financial and is reactionary to the policies, excesses, and fiscal failures of the monarchy. That phase has very little in the way of physical violence.

It's not until well after the storming of the Bastille (which was, itself, pretty tame as revolutionary skirmishes go) that things start to go off the rails. Indeed, Martyn Lyons (France under the Directory - 1975) argues that the major impetus towards the extreme violence that characterized the middle period of the Revolution was not revolutionary fervor in response to the old regime but the defense of the revolution's political gains from attacks by reactionary powers.

Now why those reactionary powers were reactionary is a worthwhile discussion in and of itself. Remember that the various Royal Families of Europe were, at this point, all pretty much cousins and that while a Catherine the Great was of real concern to the powers of Western Europe, the fall of the monarchy in France was simultaneously weird and more than a little frightening. The notion of the spread of revolutionary ideas was not unknown in Europe at this time (the Protestant Revolution was not so far in the rear view mirror) and this was a political revolution.

But not only did the revolutionaries make enemies of the monarchs of Europe - they also antagonized the Catholic Church. In a fit of revolutionary radicalism the Church had already been declared more or less subservient to the state and taken the ax to tithes and church property. This in conjuction with serious economic issues, strife between the urban and rural populations, and continued resistance from the King in accepting his position within what looked a lot like a Constitutional Monarchy brought everything to a head.

A lot of people thought that the gains of the revolution were under attack and that they needed to defend them if they wanted to keep them. Massacres, purges, wars, executions, and eventually a Reign of Terror followed. Once the system of legitimate authority broke down there was a disorganized struggle for political and marshall control of Paris and France which followed.

I think it's worth pointing out that a lot of the consternation about Unity comes from the promotional video which portrays angry mobs storming the Bastille. There is also concern about the portrayal of Robespierre but the series has a history of showing often lauded historical figures as conflicted and complex with a range of motivations and that portrayal, while ahistorical insofar as it relates to the fictitious struggle between Assassins and Templars, is a good reminder of something that often blindsides us in popular history.

The people who fought for the Revolution be it in Paris or the British Colonies were complex individuals. They did not set out to champion high minded ideals and die on the alter of Liberty; they sought real and tangible gains for themselves and their families. The appropriated for themselves the language of liberty, fraternity, and equality and while we often cast them in the hero's mantles they took up for themselves, they were every bit as complex and multidimensional as you or I or anyone who is influencing global politics today.

What Ubisoft is doing is taking advantage of our one-dimensional view of these people and projecting their own complexities informed by their fictional story line upon them. While the story telling in the AC series certainly casts the Assassins as "us" and the Templars as "them," from an objective viewpoint it is nearly impossible within the game to determine who is "good" and who is "bad."

Hell, in the previous game you played a pirate and, if you were even remotely paying attention to the way the game played, you murdered thousands of innocent sailors and merchantmen to get enough money to buy a fancier set of sails. "Good" and "bad" don't apply terribly well to the stories the AC series tells.

It is important to remember that the French Revolution spanned several incarnations and several decades- therefore at different points different groups had different goals. An essentialist view of the Revolution as simply the ousting of a fat idiotic Louis XVI and a spendthrift Marie Antoinette is problematic. This view is in line, however, with most representations of the Revolution by the non-French (à la Marie Antoinette in Sophia Coppola's film and the 1938 van Dyke production with Norma Sheerer).

The Ancien Règime was full of nobles wasting money and ending up in debt. Not just debt like we can conceive of today but debts that were substantial and there was no real system for the working class to claim them. The King was expected to house most aristocrats at Versailles, and the aristocrats housed at Versailles were expected to stay up to date with the fashions of the time (most dresses were only worn once, food was prepared to display wealth not taste good -this is a link to The Supersizers Eat...The French Revolution, a BBC show about recreating the diets of different periods in history) and all under the assumption that they were superior by blood.

These thoughts about superiority (the King being chosen by God and the Queen being superior by blood) also informed the early stages of the Revolution. The peasants did not want to abolish the monarchy per se, but the chaos created by the lack of clear desired outcomes really sent everyone into a frenzy to save their own asses and the working classes into a frenzy to change the powers that governed them. Nobles mass-printed propaganda against each other (and the Queen)-even funding Revolutionaries once it was clear that the monarchy was to be removed.

The problem in representing the Revolution is not that the aristocrats weren't positive and the mob wasn't negative, but that this was an extremely bloody, confusing, and complex time.

In regards to the claim that there is propaganda aiming to minimize the importance of the Revolution in the French identity... I will admit to not having seen it/been in discussions about it but having been in France during the election of Hollande and having seen the recent disapproval of his term it was interesting to me how many French people I spoke to rallied around some sort of idea of a revolution against the government. Certainly the Revolution in France brings to mind the Frontier in America (think Turner and his thoughts on the transformation of Europeans into Americans)- it may be viewed as the founding event of a modern French identity (and interestingly enough one that is not strictly tied to specific racial identities).

Thanks for posting the articles and threads! Interesting read.

Edited for grammar.

The two sources you're citing are the leaders of a radical left-wing party that is well known for taking some sharp stands like delivering an eulogy for the death of infamous Venezuelian president Hugo Chavez. I'm not too surprised Robespierre is among the men they want to see as the heroes of the Revolution : there has been a lot of scholar debate on this point, but basically even the most moderate point of view considers that the ideology of the Terreur (years 1792-1794, under Robespierre's leadership) intends to completely destroy the old order, (contrarily to the American War of Independence, for instance) without sparing those who did not believe in the new one.

It's not the most popular opinion, but some historians even consider that it contains in a nutshell the ideology that was put in practice by the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.

Whatever may be, the most prominent figures of the French Revolution have been glorified by the communist/marxist reading of History as the epitome of class conflicts, which explains why it is so hard to dwell upon these subjects without being a partisan of one side or the other.

Well this is one of the first and most famous historiographical debates. There are a variety of different views expressed by different historians, with most falling into a few camps. Marxists, such as Lefebvre and Soboul, argue that the Revolution was a bourgeois social revolution. Revisionists, like Cobban, argue that the revolution was mainly political, and downplay the social involvement of the bourgeoisie. Others, like Schama and Furet, take more unorthodox views, such as Schama's stressing of popular violence, and Furet's interpretation of the regime as an authoritarian control system.

I find it fantastic that some other people see it this way too. I was appalled when playing how kings, nobles and passive subjects are portrayed as good and revolutionaries as bad. However, if that was a clear opinion and every art work should have a strong one, the most worrying aspect of said opinion was the deceptive way in which it was delivered. Of course the game is silly and the plot absurd but the ideology was clearly there for every gamer with some spare attention. It was scary how the precursors of democracy, civil society, human rights and separation of church and state could be made into villains in a such a superficial manner. I am not asking for the absurd deification of american presidents but the protagonists of the french revolution clearly need more of our admiration and respect and this game was a great missed opportunity in this regard.