They hold down demanding jobs but still manage to have at least two children and enjoy the highest life expectancy in Europe. Meet the so-called “Super-Frenchies”, the Gallic wonder women behind France’s “bébé boom”.

Its economy may not be much of a model, but the country is the envy of Europe when it comes to making babies. The latest statistics show that France’s population went up by 300,000 in 2006 to 63.3m, the best birth rate in three decades.

With a fertility rate of two children per woman, France is approaching the level needed to replenish the population, compared with 1.91 children in Britain and 1.37 for Germany.

The numbers show the extent to which policies to promote childbirth, including cash payments and subsidised nannies, have paid off.

They also highlight the rise of the Super-Frenchies, as Le Figaro newspaper called the working mothers who live beyond 84, longer than any Europeans barring the Spanish.

Last week President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government seemed to be setting an example: the spotlight was on the swelling form of Rachida Dati, the 42-year-old justice minister whose rise from ghetto to government has made her the star of the “Sarkozettes”.

The unmarried Dati, for whom this is a first child, has said the birth will be “the most beautiful moment” of her life and France is abuzz with speculation about the identity of the father. Jose Maria Aznar, the former Spanish prime minister, felt obliged to deny it after being named on a website.

Being unmarried does not make Dati an aberration among the Super-Frenchies: the 274,000 marriages that were celebrated in France in 2006 were the fewest since 1995 and half of all children in France are now born outside marriage. The number of civil partnerships, by contrast, is rising.

With the support of Sarkozy, Dati was determined to carry on in her job and there was no reason for her to feel out of place in a cabinet packed with other minister mamans.

Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, the 34-year-old junior environment minister, confided last week that her mother-in-law lives with her and her husband to help to take care of Paul-Elie, her three-year-old son. “I sometimes manage to get home between 7pm and 8pm to look after him,” she said. “I try not to let more than two days go by without seeing him.”

When Valérie Pécresse, the education minister and mother of three, became an MP in 2002 she wore baggy clothes for six months to disguise her pregnancy. Sarkozy’s efforts to promote sexual equality in government have changed the mood.

Suddenly it seems the height of chic for French personalities to be photographed with bulging tummies in the glossy magazines under headlines such as “she’s expecting a boy”.

The pregnancy of Mélissa Theuriau, a popular television presenter and wife of Jamel Debbouze, the fashionable actor, merited the cover of Paris Match last week. “Ideally I’d like to have three children,” she said.

If fertility is in vogue it is also, perhaps, a new expression of nationalism: as other European countries confront a demographic timebomb of ageing populations and falling fertility, the latest French figures have been greeted with crowing predictions that the country was on course to becoming the most populous nation in western Europe.

One big breakthrough has been a policy to help women with children to carry on working. Social attitudes also playa role: studies have shown that German women, 30% of whom remain childless, do not want to be considered “cruel mothers” who put their children into daycare centres so that they can pursue their careers.

In France there is no stigma associated with this – good news for the minister mamans.

Simply bad

The unpopularity of President Nicolas Sarkozy is being blamed for disappointing sales of his wife’s much-hyped album. Carla Bruni’s record company claimed that Simply had sold 160,000 copies in France since its release in July. It has now emerged that the actual figure is just over half that at 85,000.

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