Dr. René Belloq is a fictional character and the main antagonist of Raiders of the Lost Ark. He is a French archaeologist and the archnemesis of Indiana Jones. Born in Marseilles as part of the prestigious Belloq family, he studied archaeology at the Sorbonne where he met and befriended Indiana, but eventually plagiarized his work with which he went on to win the Archaeological Society Prize and Jones could not prove the theft of Belloq's plagiarism. A career at the Louvre was cut short when Belloq was suspected of funding a grave robbing expedition and afterwards became a mercenary archaeologist with increasingly unethical methods in carrying out his work. Over the following years, Belloq embarked on several adventures in the pursuit of artifacts, often preempting or in the wake of Indiana Jones. The involvement of his rival, however, managed to frustrate his plans on a number of occasions. In 1936, after claiming a golden Chachapoyan fertility idol from Jones in Peru, Belloq was hired by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler to assist in the Reich's search for the Ark of the Covenant, an expedition that would ultimately be his undoing.