FRENCH women may be top of the European league when it comes to producing babies, but a young mother-of-two and author is spearheading a rebellion against what she calls an oppressive “baby mania” that makes a pariah of anyone who does not want children.

Corinne Maier’s tongue-in-cheek polemic No Kid: Forty Reasons For Not Having Children, has shot into the bestseller lists, appealing both to childless women irritated by the idea that they must have babies and to parents frustrated by the sacrifices of child-rearing.

Partly thanks to government incentives, France has managed to reverse a decline in its birth rate. Its women have an average of 1.94 children, compared with 1.78 in Britain.

To encourage women to work as well as having babies, the French have increased municipal childcare facilities and introduced family allowances that rise with each subsequent child. But women must have two or more children to receive non-means-tested child benefit.

About 42% of children under two receive nursery care in France, compared with 14% in Germany. France’s neigh-bours lag far behind. In Spain, the birth rate is so low at 1.35 births per woman that Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the prime minister, last week announced families would receive £1,689 for every new baby. Germany and Italy have birth rates of just 1.33 and 1.31 respectively.

Maier, 43, is far from happy with France’s fertility. “In France, people go on too much about the glory of motherhood and you’re not allowed to talk about all the problems having kids causes. I thought it would be fun to take a dig at the myth that having a child is wonderful,” she said.

The author is no stranger to tackling taboos. Her 2004 bestseller, Hello Laziness, sold 550,000 copies and amounted to a slacker’s guide to working less. It led to her leaving her job as an economist at a French electricity corporation.

In No Kid, Maier draws mercilessly on her experience of raising Laure, 13, and Cyril, 10, with her boyfriend, a psychia-trist. She rails against everything from giving birth and breastfeeding to dull holidays, no sex, stupid child-talk, Disneyland Paris and McDonald’s.

She is irritated by pregnant actresses appearing naked on magazine covers and loathes giant prams bulldozing their way down pavements, mothers whose sole topic of conversation is their children and those whose toddlers record the greeting on their answerphone.

French society dictates that women must want a child. “Any dissident is suspect: neurotic, obsessed by her career, selfish or a lesbian,” writes Maier.

How strongly does she believe in the child-free vision she advocates in her book? “I’d say it’s 50% provocation and 50% a serious book about legitimate questions people ask themselves. There are moments when I bitterly regret having kids,” she replied.

“Like last Sunday. We drove for five hours so the kids could enjoy a party with their cousins – boring for us – and on the way home my boyfriend and I wanted to see a small exhibition on surrealism. My son started shouting and running all over the place and my daughter just criticised every painting.”

Maier slapped her son, which only made things worse and led to a row with her boyfriend.

When her children turned eight, she stopped taking them to school. This year, she stopped helping them through their homework. “I told them they could ask me for help, but I wouldn’t help them do it line by line. I was spending an hour and a half on it every evening. It was mad,” she said.

Maier’s book is the most visible sign that France’s cult of motherhood, fuelled by generous state subsidies, is far from unanimously popular. Another recently published book was called Being a Woman Without Being a Mother.

The groundswell of discontent has also made it to the silver screen, with the release last week of a comedy called I Hate Other People’s Children. It shows how the friendship of three families is ruined when, on a month-long holiday, the parents criticise each other’s offspring.

Edith Vallée, a psychologist, argues that women who choose not to have children are the victims of insidious pressure in France. “Society tells them, ‘You have the right to make that choice’, but it adds or implies, ‘You’ll never be completely fulfilled’,” Vallée said.

Maier makes no bones about dreaming of a child-free France. “Just imagine. There’d be fewer of us around so rents would be cheaper, it would be easier to get a job and there’d be fewer traffic jams.

“And if people didn’t have to think about their kids all the time, they’d think about what they really want and just go out and do it.”

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