Notre Dame barricades at the bridge across the Seine

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I walked along the Seine to Notre Dame Cathedral, or at least right up to the barricades. While we watched a car exiting the guarded gate at the bridge, a Gendarme with a machine gun, woke up from his nap, and ran right up to the civilians on the other side of the gate, next to us. The the regular guards shushed him, and he had to run about fifty meters back to the van he came out of. I think that he was supposed to stay out of sight. The French are deathly worried about someone with a car or truck bomb, crashing their chain link barricades and plowing into the side of the fire ravaged Cathedral, and finishing off what that fire started, a couple of weeks before we left for our European Vacation Cruise on the Rhine, at the end of April.
After debarking at Amsterdam, we rode the Thalys train into the Gare de Nord, in Paris and were staying a few blocks away from Notre Dame, at a hotel at Cluny Square. Our Travel agent had booked us in there to be close to the Cathedral, well before it got torched.
Touchy, touchy!!

Cultural ‘enrichment’ brings all these awesome benefits with it.

Barricades, machine guns, jumpy policemen. The future looks bright, in Clown World.

The place is in danger of collapsing, those flying buttresses are a liability while the building is now not much more than a shell, and the place should not really be accessible to anyone other than the people with the wherewithal, never mind any member of the public being near it.

We were watching some giant construction cranes lift bundles of lumber for the temp. roof. Those flying buttresses seem to resist the walls buckling outwards, but they still looked statically solid to me. I doubt that there's enough mass to really push the walls inward, and trigger a collapse.