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Unless youre a basement-dwelling geek, youve probably never heard of the Golden Joystick Awards, much less voted online to determine the winners in the video-game industrys version of the Oscars. But youll be happy to know that Canada distinguished itself once again at this years GJAs.

The huge Montreal operation of French gaming giant Ubisofit was chosen studio of the year by the thousands of hard-core gamers who voted, the kind of people who know their PlayStations from their Xboxes. Unfortunately, not everyone in France is celebrating the success of their game-crazy Qubcois cousins.

Ubisofts Montreal studio was the lead developer on Assassins Creed Unity, the latest entry in the Assassins Creed series that previously used the Crusades and the American Revolution as backdrops. The company apologized this week for the games bugs and unexpected technical issues and vowed to fix them. But thats not what has upset some French politicians. AC Unity is set in revolutionary France and leftist politicians have denounced the games reactionary depiction of the Revolution as an inglorious bloodbath.

The king, a traitor and Marie-Antoinette, that cretin are presented as brave little people. And Robespierre, our liberator at one moment, is presented as a monster, Jean-Pierre Mlenchon, a former Socialist minister who now heads the Front de Gauche, charged after AC Unity was released this month. He denounced the game as propaganda against the people.

The denigration of the great Revolution is dirty work that seeks to further instill self-loathing and [a feeling of] declinism among the French, Mr. Mlenchon went on to say in Le Figaro, providing Ubisoft with priceless publicity. Historians who viewed the game to decide for themselves were blown away by the painstaking digital recreation of 18th century Paris, even if they found the bloodletting somewhat over the top.

That the game was developed in Montreal may be at the root of the controversy. The French king lost New France three decades before his successor lost his head. Except for the 1837 Rebellion, Quebec remained docile for another two centuries, as the clergy and elites avoided revolt until the Quiet Revolution. When it came, it was (almost) entirely bloodless and couched in the language of collective rights and nationalism, not individual rights or liberty.

The French Revolution is nowhere near as revered in Quebec as it is among French intellectuals, who remain fiercely anti-clerical and anti-monarchist. In France, discussions of the Revolution still tend to turn on whether the means justified the ends, with those on the left insisting they did. But if king and clergy had it coming to them in 1789, what followed was hardly a model for how to replace an unjust political order with a just and democratic one.

Writing in 1790, conservative British politician Edmund Burke vowed to suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France until I was informed how it had been combined with government with morality and religion, with peace and order, with civil and social manners. For without them, Burke continued, liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts and is not likely to continue long. It was a prescient observation.

During Robespierres Reign of Terror, in 1793 and 1794, the mere suspicion of counterrevolutionary thought was enough to earn one a rendezvous with the guillotine. As Charles Dickens would later write, the National Razor superseded the cross as a symbol of public worship. It sheared off heads so many, that it, and the ground it most polluted, were a rotten red.

In a world where failed states and unsuccessful popular uprisings (see Arab Spring) are still a fact of life, the French Revolution is as relevant as ever to the study of democracy and how best to achieve it. If you dont get your priorities right from the get-go, it could haunt you for centuries to come.

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Democracy and the Golden Joystick