At a ceremony at the French national assembly attended by Nobel prize winners, former government ministers, MPs, decorated scientists and academics, all attention was on a previously unknown literature professor.<\/p>\n
Florent Montaclair, then 46, a balding, bespectacled figure in an ill-fitting suit and ros\u00e9-coloured shirt, was receiving the 2016 Gold Medal of Philology – the study of linguistics \u2013 from an international society of the same name.<\/p>\n
Montaclair was the first French recipient of the medal, previously awarded to the Italian author and linguist Umberto Eco<\/a>, those attending were told.<\/p>\n It was a glittering event and an impressive achievement \u2013 but unfortunately, detectives claim, the award itself was entirely fake and part of a complex international hoax worthy of a film script.<\/p>\n Although the ceremony did take place, there was no International Society of Philology. The American university to which it was supposedly affiliated existed only online and its address was traced to a jewellery store in Lewes, Delaware. The award \u2013 likened to a Nobel prize \u2013 was invented by Montaclair, and the academic had bought the medal from a jeweller in Paris for \u20ac250 to present to himself.<\/p>\n Now the professor is under investigation for suspected forgery, use of forged documents, impersonation and fraud. He denies any criminality.<\/p>\n The public prosecutor Paul-\u00c9douard Lallois, based in Montb\u00e9liard in eastern France<\/a>, said detectives had spent months trying to unpick what he described as a \u201ctissue of lies\u201d. He said he found \u201call roads lead back to Monsieur Montaclair\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was all a gigantic hoax. It could be made into a film or television series,\u201d Lallois told the Guardian.<\/p>\n The labyrinthine investigation now centres on whether Montclair, employed at the Marie and Louis Pasteur University, a teacher training college in Besan\u00e7on, used the fake medal and a \u201cdoctorate\u201d from the University of Philology and Education in the US to obtain a promotion and pay rise.<\/p>\n Until 2015, when an article appeared in his local newspaper claiming he was about to win the equivalent of a Nobel prize or Fields medal, Montaclair was an unremarkable teaching instructor who liked to write fantasy books, many about vampires, in his spare time.<\/p>\n After the national assembly ceremony, Montaclair, who gave a Tedx Talk<\/a> titled the Galilean Challenge, decided the next recipient should be the American intellectual Noam Chomsky<\/a>, then 87, who travelled to Paris to collect the award in front of 200 people.<\/p>\n But in 2018, Montaclair designated the Romanian academic Eugen Simion, then 85, as winner and the complex alleged hoax began to fall apart.<\/p>\n Romanian journalists from the online publication Scena9, intrigued by the honour bestowed on one of their compatriots, dug deeper and discovered that the University of Philology and Education and the International Society of Philology existed solely through websites created and hosted in France.<\/p>\n