Marie-France Hirigoyen was born in 1949 in France. Having doctor’s degree in medicine, she is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist specialised in mobbing, a form of bullying. Her interest in stress led her in the mid-1980s into victimology, a branch of criminology. She later turned her attention to workplace stress generated by mobbing behaviour.
Her publications include "Moral Harassment: The Perverse Violence of Daily Life" ("Le harcèlement moral, la violence perverse au quotidien"), which sold 450,000 copies in her native country and was translated and sold in 24 other countries, not excluding Bulgaria (Colibri, 2001).