French Professor Faces Allegations of Massive Fraud After Creating Fake Nobel-Style Award

At a ceremony in the French National Assembly attended by Nobel laureates, former ministers, MPs, decorated scientists and academics, all eyes fell on a previously obscure literature professor.

Florent Montaclair, then 46, a balding, bespectacled man in an ill‑fitting suit and a rose‑coloured shirt, was receiving the 2016 Gold Medal of Philology – the study of linguistics – from an international society bearing the same name.

Montaclair was said to be the first French recipient of the medal, previously awarded to Italian author and linguist Umberto Eco, those present were told.

The event was glittering and seemed an impressive achievement, but detectives later asserted that the award itself was entirely fabricated and part of an elaborate international hoax worthy of a film script.

Although the ceremony did occur, there was no International Society of Philology. The American university to which it was supposedly linked existed only online; its address traced to a jewellery store in Lewes, Delaware. The medal – likened to a Nobel prize – was invented by Montaclair, who bought it from a Paris jeweller for €250 to present to himself.

Now the professor is under investigation for suspected forgery, use of forged documents, impersonation and fraud. He denies any wrongdoing.

Public prosecutor Paul‑Édouard Lallois, based in Montbéliard in eastern France, said detectives had spent months untangling what he described as a “tissue of lies”. He added that he found “all roads lead back to Monsieur Montaclair”.

“It was all a gigantic hoax. It could be made into a film or television series,” Lallois told CuriosityNews.

The investigation now focuses on whether Montaclair, employed at the Marie and Louis Pasteur University – a teacher‑training college in Besançon – used the fake medal and a purported “doctorate” from the University of Philology and Education in the United States to secure a promotion and a pay increase.

Until 2015, when a local newspaper article claimed he was about to win the equivalent of a Nobel prize or Fields medal, Montaclair was an unremarkable teaching instructor who enjoyed writing fantasy books, many about vampires, in his spare time.

After the National Assembly ceremony, Montaclair, who gave a TEDx Talk titled the Galilean Challenge, announced that the next recipient should be American intellectual Noam Chomsky, then 87, who travelled to Paris to collect the award before an audience of 200.

In 2018, Montaclair designated Romanian academic Eugen Simion, then 85, as the winner, and the alleged hoax began to unravel.

Journalists from the online publication Scena9, intrigued by the honour bestowed on a compatriot, investigated further and discovered that both the University of Philology and Education and the International Society of Philology existed only through websites created and hosted in France.