Popular video game Assassin's Creed: Unity has become the unlikely target of an attack by a French firebrand politician who argues that the blockbuster video game makes a travesty of the French Revolution.

Former French minister Jean-Luc Mélenchon has said the game feeds on the same anti-republican sentiment that fuels the far-right extremists of today.

Assassin's Creed outrageously presents people like the "cretin" Marie-Antoinette and the "treacherous" King Louis XVI as fine upstanding people, while it portrays the French masses, the sans-culottes, as bloodthirsty savages, Mr Mélenchon said.

Worst of all, it depicts Robespierre as a monster when in reality he said he was initially a hero of the 1789 Revolution who gave the vote to Jews and wanted to extend it to women, said Mr Mélenchon, a former minister who left the mainstream Socialists to form his own far-left Front de Gauche party.

Unity is the latest video game to be released in the Assassin's Creed series created by French publisher Ubisoft. It was launched on Tuesday and was immediately criticised by players, the media and its own investors after it was found to contain wide-ranging glitches.

But the latest attack is one of the first times it has been criticised for its content, which had thus far been praised for providing a vivid portrayal of Paris during one of the most tumultuous periods in the city's history.

The game, one of the most anticipated launches of 2014, is set at the height of the French Revolution which saw the sans-culottes rise up against what they saw as the heartless King Louis XVI, who was later guillotined.

Its hero is Arno Victor Dorian, a young French nobleman whose adventures take him across the rooftops of Notre Dame cathedral, through the skull-filled Catacombs and among the angry mobs rampaging through Paris.



Former French minister Jean-Luc Mélenchon (Rex)

But its portrayal of the politics of the Revolution has infuriated Mr Mélenchon, who denounced the game in a lengthy tirade in an interview with France Inter radio.

"It is propaganda against the people, the people who are (portrayed as) barbarians, bloodthirsty savages," he said.

"In 1789 there were the poor aristocrats, and they are presented as fine upstanding people."

He noted that the king had tried to get foreign armies to come to France to save him, and that his wife Marie-Antoinette, "that cretin, who is celebrated as a poor little rich girl" had tried to buy off politicians to save her skin.

"And the man who was our liberator at a certain moment of the Revolution – because the Revolution lasted a long time – Robespierre, is presented as a monster," said the politician who got 11 per cent of the vote in his failed bid for the French presidency in 2102.

Robespierre was one of the best-known and most influential figures of the French Revolution.

He is seen by many as dictatorial and fanatical and is associated with the mass executions of "enemies of the Revolution". But his supporters praise him as a spokesman for the poor and oppressed and a guardian of the French Republic.

Mr Mélenchon concluded his tirade against the game by saying that it "presents an image of hatred of the Revolution, hatred of the people, hatred of the republic which is rampant in the far-right milieux (of today)."