One poll can be dismissed as a freak. But now a second opinion poll in France has suggested that Marine Le Pen, the new leader of the National Front (succeeding her dad, Jean-Marie) would top the polls in the first round of the presidential election – beating President Sarkozy and any conceivable Socialist candidate into second and third place.

President Sarkozy has taken the political lead in promoting “happiness” economics. He even appointed a Stiglitz-led commission to report on alternatives to GDP-per-capita as measures of national well-being. It reported last month and made some interesting points.

But there is a snag. France – the champion of “quality of life”, “the art of living”, the long lunch and sexual liberation (see Carla Bruni, Roman Polanski, Frederic Mitterand etc) – also seems to be a startlingly miserable place. I was shocked by this article in last week’s Economist about the rate of suicide in France. Only the Japanese seem to be killing themselves at a significantly faster rate. Champions of Anglo-Saxon capitalism might note, with grim satisfaction, that suicide rates in Britain and the US are significantly lower than in France. But then Italy has the lowest rate of all the countries on the Economist table.

Who saw the crash coming? Well, careful readers of the FT would have recieved some warning. I refer not to the work of Gillian Tett or Martin Wolf – although both can claim some credit – but to this short story by Julian Gough, an Irish novelist based, which was published in the FT.  Gough’s account of the inflation of goat-prices in Somalia and their impact on the global economy now seems eerily like an allegorical warning of what was to befall us.

Mr Gough has now been rewarded – either for his literary flair or his economic insights – by having his story dramatised on BBC Radio 4. If you hurry, you can listen to it here - before they take the link down next Friday. The Hollywood movie goes into production next year, although the part of the goat is yet to be cast.

Until I arrived in Paris I was under the impression that Nicolas Sarkozy was experiencing something of a renaissance. The French presidency of the EU was generally felt to have gone well. Sarkozy is one of the few political figures in Europe who still radiates a sense of energy and purpose.

But it is not doing him much good in the opinion polls. The papers here report that the bounce he achieved in the second half of last year has now dwindled away and Sarko is now back down to approval levels of between 36% and 44% (according to which poll you choose) – and has fallen between 4% and 9% in just a month. He is back down to the (dis)approval ratings he was achieving during his bling period in the spring of last year. The main explanation for the fall in his popularity is pretty simple – the economy.

Sarkozy’s position at the G20 will be important. He has a good relationship with Gordon Brown and a famously frosty relationship with Angela Merkel. But the French position on international economic governance is actually closer to that of the Germans than the Brits. The French and Germans are keen on much tougher regulation of global finance, and think the Brits are still primarily concerned with warding off “over-regulation” of the City. And the French are also grumbling about the huge devaluation of the pound against the euro – and anxious about the impact this will have on French industry.

It has been fun talking about all this with French journalist friends. But like journalists everywhere, I find that first first and foremost they are pre-occupied by the sorry state of the press. Le Figaro is looking really thin and even Le Monde is under huge pressure. I was surprised to be told that Le Monde now has only one full-time reporter covering the EU in Brussels (plus another who does Belgium and Nato.) Just three years ago, they had a four-person Brussels bureau. These days even the French can’t afford to cover the EU properly.