Yeah, so why *isn’t* Charlotte Corday in the new Assassin’s Creed?

Charlotte-Corday-Paul-Jacques-Aime-Baudry-1860Look, I’ve never played any Assassin’s Creed games, and I’m not the first to say this, but how stupid do you have to be to make a French Revolution assassins game with no female character and then act like it’s because there weren’t any female assassins?

I also realize the games aren’t intended to be “historically accurate” by any stretch but there’s taking creative liberties with history to tell a story and then there’s just straight-up erasing history outside the context of the story, solely to justify bad decisions. And that would include making an outrageous claim like that.

Jean-Paul Marat’s assassination in 1793 by Charlotte Corday was a major trigger for the start of the Reign of Terror. I know I’m more in the French Revolution history than most — I believe I had a little copy of David’s The Death of Marat over my desk for about eight years for some unintentionally creepy reason — but Corday is, like, French Revolution 101. It had to have come up during the research for the game.

Moreover, French women in general played a huge role in the Revolutionary period, while radical women also played key roles. This reality has been repeatedly depicted in just about every other fictional or semi-historical version of the time period. Charles Dickens, way back in the Victorian Age when everyone was really giving women the short end of the stick, put a very important female character in a leadership role in his version of Revolutionary France in A Tale of Two Cities. So there’s really no excuse. Stop being lazy, Ubisoft.

Bill Humphrey

About Bill Humphrey

Bill Humphrey is the primary host of WVUD's Arsenal For Democracy talk radio show and a local elected official.
Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed