Workers remain at their jobs until retirement, stymieing the promotion of those below them, she argues, yet a system of patronage and stiff legal protections make it difficult for employers to fire anyone. Years of such stagnation in France's hierarchy-obsessed society have produced elaborate rituals to keep people busy.

''Work is organized a little like the court of Louis XIV, very complicated and very ritualized so that people feel they are working effectively when they are not,'' she said.

Her solution? Rather than keep up what she sees as an exhausting charade, people who dislike what they do should, as she puts it, discreetly disengage. If done correctly -- and her book gives a few tips, such as looking busy by always carrying a stack of files -- few co-workers will notice, and those who do will be too worried about rocking the boat to complain. Given the difficulty of firing employees, she says, frustrated superiors are more likely to move such subversive workers up than out.

The book's title is a play on ''Bonjour Tristesse,'' the title of the 1954 best-selling novel by Françoise Sagan that recounted a worldly young woman's cynical approach to relationships and sex. Ms. Maier's book, subtitled ''The Art and Necessity of Doing the Least Possible in a Corporation,'' is concerned with a more mundane malaise.

With chapters titled ''The Morons Who Are Sitting Next To You'' and ''Beautiful Swindles,'' it declares that corporate culture is nothing more than the ''crystallization of the stupidity of a group of people at a given moment.''

Her employer of 12 years was not amused. Irritated that she identified herself as an Électricité de France employee on the back cover of her book, company officials wrote her a stern letter accusing her of inattention at meetings, leaving work early and ''spreading gangrene from within,'' just as her book advocates. They demanded that she appear for a disciplinary hearing, though the original Aug. 17 date has been pushed back to September. That's because Ms. Maier is going on vacation.

''They want to make an example of me,'' Ms. Maier said.

When she received the letter from her employer, she did what any French worker would do: she took it to the company union and asked them to help in her defense. The union, already engaged in a bitter battle with management over a partial privatization scheme, took the case to the news media, where it received instant and widespread attention.