French Furniture Experts Guilty in Multimillion-Euro Versailles Forgery Scam

A major forgery scandal has shaken the French art world after Bill Pallot, once regarded as the leading expert on 18th-century French chairs, and woodcarver Bruno Desnoues were convicted for producing and selling fake furniture purportedly from the era of Marie Antoinette. The scam, which ran from 2008 to 2015, involved using authentic 18th-century wooden frames but creating entirely fake chairs that deceived prestigious buyers including the Palace of Versailles and wealthy collectors such as a Qatari prince, causing around €4.5 million in damages. Pallot and Desnoues initially treated the operation as a game to test if the art market would notice, with Pallot admitting, "It went like a breeze." Versailles spent over €1.5 million on six counterfeit royal chairs, prompting a 2016 audit of its acquisitions policy after the police investigation began. Pallot received a four-year suspended prison sentence, a €200,000 fine, and a five-year ban on working as an expert, while Desnoues was sentenced to a three-year suspended sentence and a €100,000 fine; both had already served four months in prison on remand. The court acquitted the gallery accused of selling the fakes, which maintained it was unaware of the forgeries, highlighting the difficulty in detecting such sophisticated scams within the art market.