Assassin's Creed Unity: Revolutionary Paris

Unity opens at Versailles in 1776, where Arno meets Élise de la Serre in the palace — and the same day his father is murdered there by the Templar Shay Cormac. Years later Arno is found drunk in a Versailles bar, hunting the watch that belonged to his father; Élise turns up holding it and talks him into going back to Paris. He returns once more to kill La Touche in the town's streets. The court lived in these rooms until 6 October 1789; around 1,000 of the palace's 2,300 rooms are now national museum.

Visitor guidance: The palace and gardens are open to visitors; the museum is in the palace and the two Trianons.

Arno's first stop in Unity is a prison cell: framed for the murder of the Templar who adopted him, he is locked up without trial and shares the Bastille with Pierre Bellec, who spots his father's watch and understands who Arno is. On 14 July 1789 the fortress is stormed and the two slip out in the crowd, Bellec offering him the Brotherhood if he wants a reason to live. The real assault cost 94 dead after four hours of fighting. The towers are gone — the fortress was demolished and its footprint is today's Place de la Bastille.

Visitor guidance: Only the square survives; the fortress was demolished and the Place de la Bastille took its place.

Arno takes Bellec's offer and slips under the Île Saint-Louis to the Paris Assassins' hideout, where Honoré Mirabeau runs the Brotherhood. His initiation is a single gesture: drink from a chalice, and the remorse he carries for his father and de la Serre goes with it. The cellars are fiction. The island above is not — eleven hectares, one of only two natural islands in the Seine, once grazing ground for cattle and split in two by a canal in 1360. Its quiet stone streets and quais are worth the walk.

Location precision: The hideout is reached from under the island; the pin marks the Île Saint-Louis itself.

Visitor guidance: The island's streets and quais are open to walk; there is nothing to enter beneath them.

Notre-Dame is one of the real landmarks Unity rebuilds, and after the April 2019 fire it briefly became the game's most famous building: Ubisoft gave the whole game away free for a week so players could walk the cathedral exactly as it had been modelled in Unity, then reused that model for a VR tour — although Ubisoft's own team admits the model is not historically accurate. The real cathedral reopened in December 2024. Building began in 1163, on the island that gives the game one of its seven districts.

Visitor guidance: Reopened in December 2024 after the 2019 fire; the cathedral stands on the Île de la Cité, in the game its own district.

By 1792 the Revolution is eating the palace. On 10 August the revolutionaries storm the Tuileries to capture Louis XVI, and Arno goes in after letters from Mirabeau to the king — and walks straight into Napoleon Bonaparte, an artillery commander serving the Revolution, helping himself to the Apple of Eden the king had hidden. The palace had been the Paris home of monarchs from Henri IV to Napoleon III; the Commune burned it in 1871 and it was demolished in 1883. Building began in 1564, for Catherine de' Medici.

Visitor guidance: Nothing of the palace survives; the site is the open square between the Louvre and the garden.

Arno tracks Germain to the death of Louis XVI, and the game dates it: 21 January 1793, on the square the Revolution has renamed the Place de la Révolution. Germain watches from the crowd and tells Arno that everything since de la Serre's murder has led here. Arno protects Élise instead of giving chase and lets Germain run; Élise stops working with him, and the Brotherhood strips Arno of his rank and bans him from the Paris Assassins. The real square is today's Place de la Concorde: 7.6 hectares, the largest in the city, and the scene of the executions of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and Robespierre.

Visitor guidance: Open public square at the eastern end of the Champs-Élysées; it took the name back after the July Revolution of 1830.

The Terror's last turn. On 27 July 1794 the National Convention accuses Robespierre of tyranny, and Arno and Élise go to the Hôtel de Ville to take him, where he has his own men around him. Élise orders him to tell her where Germain is hiding and shoots him in the jaw to make him give it up. The city hall you can enter today is a rebuild: the Commune burned the original in May 1871, taking the city archives with it, and the outside was put back between 1874 and 1882, larger than the wings it replaced.

Visitor guidance: The façade is the 1874–1882 rebuild, larger than the wings it replaced.

The Dead Kings expansion takes Arno north to Saint-Denis, then Franciade, a month after Élise's death, where the Marquis de Sade sends him after a manuscript hidden in a tomb under the city. Beneath the basilica lies a Precursor temple, and Napoleon's man Captain Philippe Rose wants the Apple of Eden buried in it. The basilica above is no invention — a former abbey church whose choir of 1144 is credited as the first building to use every element of Gothic architecture.

Location precision: The Precursor temple exists only in the game; the pin marks the basilica the game puts it under.

Visitor guidance: A working parish church north of Paris; the Gallo-Roman cemetery remains lie beneath the cathedral.

Last of all, Arno makes sure Germain stays out of reach. Years after the endgame he and Napoleon recover the skeleton and put it in the catacombs, and Bishop is confident that Abstergo will never find the remains. The real ossuary runs south from the Barrière d'Enfer, the old city gate, and holds the remains of more than six million people: from 1788, night after night, covered wagons carried them down from the capital's cemeteries to a mine shaft near the Rue de la Tombe-Issoire.

Location precision: The game names only the catacombs; the pin marks the ossuary's Barrière d'Enfer end.