The splendidly-titled Charpentiers sans Frontières have worked night and day. There have been 340,000 individual financial donations from more than 150 countries.

It has been a mighty achievement, showcasing the resplendent abilities of the French nation.

Notre Dame has been rescued. But absolutely nothing could be done to preserve the future of the government of Emmanuel Macron and his beleaguered and honourable prime minister Michel Barnier, who became the sixth premier lost to France in seven years.

It is the first time a French government has fallen on a no-confidence vote since De Gaulle and Pompidou in 1962, and it comes with more than two years of Mr Macron’s presidency still to run.

The removal of the 73-year-old former EU chief Brexit negotiator came after just three months in office and was caused by an alliance of left-wingers and Marine Le Pen’s populist National Party who overwhelmingly rejected an austerity budget which would have produced €40bn in savings and €20bn in tax rises.

The crisis arrives at the worst possible moment for Europe, with Donald Trump knocking on the door, mounting anxieties over Ukraine, and with Germany’s government also on the point of unravelling. Nor is there any guarantee that any successor to Mr Barnier will be able to do better.

Tough economic choices “won’t disappear by the magic of a no-confidence vote”, he said in his valedictory speech.

“This reality will come back to haunt any government, whoever it is,” he added.

Monsieur Macron, who precipitated this collapse into chaos by calling a reckless midsummer election, faces an unsettling 30 months as a lame-duck leader. Some 59% of French voters want him to stand down earlier but, in a broadcast to the country, he undertook to serve his term “fully, until its end”.

It would be a huge gamble to call another snap election.

For Marine Le Pen, who many assumed was a dead letter after she was accused of embezzling European Parliament funds, it is a moment of sweet revenge. Support for her runs consistently at 40%. The potent image of her and her allies laughing during the vote of no confidence — Mr Barnier observed mordantly that he was downed by a “coalition of opposites” — was a reminder that her influence is stronger than anyone imagined following the legislative polls of June and July.

“La Débâcle” proclaimed one of the Parisian front pages on Thursday, echoing Émile Zola’s account of the collapse of the reign of Napoleon III and the Second Empire in 1870.

Donald Trump, who is in Paris for the Notre Dame celebrations, will look around him and may conclude that the day may still come for populism in France. And he will look next to Germany, which faces the increasing momentum of the AfD at the ballot box in the new year, and observe that his ducks are getting in a row before he even enters The White House.

The lasting legacy of the Vikings

To previous generations, one of the most famous sketches from Monty Python’s Flying Circus featured a cohort of Vikings singing lustily about the merits of Spam processed meat.

The humour was, perhaps, of the moment (the last episode of that classic programme was broadcast this week 50 years ago) but the Nordic raiders remain topical, and nowhere more so than at University College Cork where a researcher has landed a €2m contract to assess the Vikings' historical impact on Europe.

The granting of funds from the European Research Council will allow Tom Birkett to factually assess the narrative of how the Vikings transformed the continent between the 8th and 11th centuries.

The feared Scandinavian sea raiders and their trademark dragon-headed longships drove trade, including slaves, jewellery, clothing, and spices, and had an enormous influence on Ireland and the foundation of cities such as Cork, Limerick, Waterford, and Dublin.

Part of the five-year project will be a unique, crowd-sourced ‘NorseMap’ to help track their legacy.

Whether that will include personalities who have become familiar to us through the popularity of the Irish-located TV series Vikings we will have to wait to see.

But we hope there will be honourable mentions for Lagertha and her shield maidens, Floki, Ivar the Boneless, and King Harald Finehair and all the Berserkers. Dr Birkett said: 

The Vikings are everywhere we look in the modern world, used to entertain, sell products, promote tourism, underpin political movements, and support diverse identities.  

Strange to think, therefore, that people once paid them to go away with the use of a financial tribute whose title resonates to this day.

The poet Rudyard Kipling wrote: “If once you have paid him the Dane-geld, You never get rid of the Dane.”

And indeed, knowing what the Vikings have done for us, why would we want to?

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Masculine behaviour crosses red lines

We have already commented this week on the hubbub arising from the (mis)behaviour of Gregg Wallace, the working-class cockney who until just over a week ago was the chippy co-compere of the most popular cooking programme on TV.

Wallace, 60, has been accused of “inappropriate touching” and sexually-harassing behaviour dating back a number of years.

He denies the claims, but has “stepped away” from MasterChef while the broadcaster, the BBC, investigates allegations which keep on coming.

While Wallace may not have recognised that the days of his style of sexual badinage have long been over, his demise provides a reminder of the changing limits of masculinity.

And, given recent research from Ireland’s Women’s Aid to mark the organisation’s 50th birthday, that may be timely.

Its survey found that 40% of men have “traditional” views of the opposite sex, and that half of those views are harmful towards women.

Of this cadre, 52% agreed with the statement: “Men who don’t dominate in relationships aren’t real men.”

And 54% agreed that “a man’s worth is measured by power and control over others”.

Worryingly, 46% supported the proposition that “real men shouldn’t have to care about women’s opinions or feelings”.

These views are shared predominantly among younger men between the ages of 18 and 29, and while this might indicate a want of maturity, Women’s Aid chief executive Sarah Benson pointed to the “outsized influence of online role models” as an important factor.

These examples and indications of male behaviour tell us that there is progress still to be made in terms of day-to-day attitudes. And they coincide with a long-awaited development in one of the most controversial cases to come before the courts this year.

January 23 has been set for the State’s appeal against the “undue leniency” of the fully-suspended sentence handed down to a former soldier who beat a woman unconscious on a Limerick street and later boasted about it on social media.

Cathal Crotty, aged 22, from Parkroe Heights, Ardnacrusha, Co Clare, received a three-year suspended sentence at Limerick Circuit Criminal Court last June and was ordered to pay €3,000 in compensation after he pleaded guilty to carrying out an unprovoked attack on Natasha O’Brien on O’Connell St in Limerick in May 2022.

Hours after the attack, Crotty, who was a serving member of the Defence Forces at the time, boasted to friends on Snapchat: “Two to put her down, two to put her out.”

His victim sustained a broken nose and bruising, and suffered subsequent nightmares and panic attacks.

There is no shortage of red lines to mark the limits of male aggression of various forms.

Thursday’s award of costs against mixed martial arts champion Conor McGregor following the case brought by Nikita Hand was another indication that momentum for change remains highly topical.