French professor investigated for awarding himself fake prize

A French academic is under investigation for inventing a Nobel-style prize for philology in order that he could then go on to win it.

Florent Montaclair, from Besançon in eastern France, was decorated with the Gold Medal of Philology in 2016 at a ceremony held at the National Assembly in Paris, attended by ministers and Nobel laureates.

But the prize was a fiction, as was the body that supposedly awarded it, the International Society of Philology - both apparently dreamed up by Montaclair to burnish his academic credentials.

Philology is the study of language through texts.

Investigators in Besançon are now looking into the affair to see if any laws were broken, while the university where Montaclair taught for 20 years has suspended him indefinitely.

"It's such an unlikely tale, it could be out of a film," said Paul-Edouard Lallois, the prosecutor in charge of the enquiry.

According to Lallois, Montaclair began his invention in 2015, around the time a Besançon newspaper carried a story headlined: "Local man on shortlist for Nobel."

The report said that Montaclair was down to the last five for the prestigious international award.

In December, he was reported to have won it, and in June the following year the awards ceremony took place in Paris.

Then later that year the story reached a new level when Montaclair welcomed the celebrated US philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky, then aged 88, at a ceremony in Brussels and awarded him an honorary gold medal from the International Society.

Video of the ceremony can be seen online, as can the website of the society, which gives a list of laureates going back to 1967, including the Italian writer Umberto Eco.

The amateurishness of the website should perhaps have raised questions.

Meanwhile, Montaclair had further polished his CV by claiming a doctorate in French literature and grammar issued by the University of Philology and Education situated in Lewes in the US state of Delaware. No record of this university exists.

"The gold medal for philology is a pure creation of Mr Florent Montaclair, who awarded it to himself via the intervention of this learned society, which he himself had evidently created, and this university, which only exists on an internet site," said Lallois.

The whole affair was uncovered after Montaclair named a Romanian philologist Eugen Simion as the next recipient of the prize.

The story created a sensation in Romania but prompted a team of suspicious journalists there to start asking questions.

But even when the reality emerged in 2019, it passed unnoticed in France, where Montaclair continued his work at the university.

Only last year did the truth come out, when Montaclair was due to chair a discussion on fake news and a colleague remembered hearing the rumours from Romania.

According to Le Monde newspaper, when police came to search his house in February this year, Montaclair said to them "I suppose it's about the medal", and he told them he had ordered it from a jeweller a short time before the Paris ceremony at a cost of €250 (£215).

"It's not a con. It's an attempt to set up a new distinction in the world of academia - an attempt that failed," he is reported as saying.

The prosecutor's office needs now to decide whether inventing the honours artificially boosted Montaclair's career.

If not, it may be difficulty to prove that he did anything criminal.

When Montaclair defended himself, he said making up a worthless award is not in itself against the law, and it was local media who had described it as a Nobel.