French Professor Caught Red-Handed Awarding Himself Fake Nobel Prize

It reads like a Hollywood screenplay, but it’s devastatingly real. Florent Montaclair, a philology professor from Besançon in eastern France, spent years meticulously constructing an elaborate academic fraud so he could crown himself with glory.

Here’s the jaw-dropping scheme: Montaclair invented the Gold Medal of Philology out of thin air. Then he created a fake awarding body called the International Society of Philology. Finally, in 2016, he threw himself an awards ceremony at the National Assembly in Paris, complete with ministers and Nobel laureates in attendance. The whole thing was an illusion.

But wait, it gets worse.

Montaclair didn’t stop at personal glory. He weaponized his fake credentials by giving an honorary gold medal to celebrated US philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky at a ceremony in Brussels. Chomsky, then 88 years old, had no idea the award came from a phantom organization that existed only on the internet and in Montaclair’s mind. Videos of the ceremony are still online.

The International Society’s website listed laureates stretching back to 1967, including Italian writer Umberto Eco. The amateurish design should have been a red flag for anyone paying attention.

Montaclair went even further. He claimed a doctorate from the University of Philology and Education in Lewes, Delaware. That institution doesn’t exist either.

The entire house of cards finally collapsed after Montaclair named Romanian philologist Eugen Simion as the next medal recipient. Romanian journalists smelled something fishy and started digging. The truth emerged in 2019, but bizarrely, nobody in France seemed to care. Montaclair kept his job at the university for two more years until a colleague remembered the Romania controversy right as he was scheduled to chair a discussion about fake news.

When police raided his house in February, Montaclair’s response was almost casual: “I suppose it’s about the medal.” He admitted ordering it from a jeweler for €250 just before the Paris ceremony.

His defense? “It’s not a con. It’s an attempt to set up a new distinction in the world of academia that failed.” He insists the local media hyped it as a Nobel, not him.

Now prosecutors in Besançon face an unprecedented legal puzzle: Did a worthless fake medal actually boost his career artificially, or is creating an imaginary honors system simply not illegal in France? The investigation is still ongoing.