French Professor Invented a Philology Prize and Awarded It to Himself

Florent Montaclair, a philology professor at a small university in eastern France, fabricated the Gold Medal of Philology in 2014, claiming it was a prestigious award dating back to 1967. He created a fake International Society of Philology and a fictitious University of Philology and Education in Lewes, Delaware. In 2016, he awarded the medal to himself at a ceremony in the French National Assembly attended by politicians and Nobel laureates. He later awarded it to Noam Chomsky in 2017 and Eugen Simion in 2018. The hoax was exposed by Romanian outlet Scena9 in 2018 but remained largely unnoticed in France until 2025, when a colleague flagged it before a conference on fake news. Montaclair was arrested and interrogated on February 10, 2026. He is under investigation for fraud, as the medal may have influenced his promotion to full professor in 2022. He also faces a lawsuit from UNESCO for falsely claiming to lead a nonexistent UNESCO center in Besançon.