Professor Accused of Inventing Fake Nobel-Style Prize

A French language scholar is accused of doing more than polishing his résumé—prosecutors say he invented the prize listed on it, the BBC reports. Florent Montaclair, a longtime academic in Besançon, is under investigation after allegedly creating a bogus "Gold Medal of Philology" and the equally fictional "International Society of Philology," then naming himself its 2016 laureate at a ceremony in France's National Assembly attended by ministers and real Nobel winners. Local media even mistakenly said he was in the running for the equivalent of a Nobel prize, the Guardian reports.

Prosecutor Paul-Edouard Lallois calls it a plot worthy of a movie: a website listing past winners like Umberto Eco, a made-up American university in Delaware that supposedly granted Montaclair a doctorate, and even an honorary medal presented to Noam Chomsky at a 2017 Brussels event. Montaclair was said to be the first French laureate, Le Monde reports. The scheme started to unravel when Montaclair announced Romanian scholar Eugen Simion as the next recipient, prompting Romanian reporters to scrutinize the prize. Though doubts surfaced abroad in 2019, his French university only suspended him last year, after a colleague recalled the rumors while Montaclair was slated to lead a panel on disinformation.

Montaclair has told police the medal cost about $300 and insists it was a failed bid to create a new academic distinction, not fraud. Prosecutors must now decide whether the invented honors illegally advanced his career.