Hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered in Paris on Sunday to protest government plans to legalise same-sex marriage.

Organisers suggested that up to 1.4 million had attended, while police suggested that there were at least 300,000 at the march.

Over 800,000 demonstrators had flooded into the capital for an anti-gay marriage march in January.

The hugely controversial bill to legalise same-sex marriage and adoption was passed by the lower chamber of parliament and will go to the Senate for examination and approval in April.

The upper house is unlikely to prevent the proposal from becoming law by the summer. The protestors want the government to withdraw the project and put it to a referendum.

Opinion polls suggest a majority of French people still support gay marriage but their numbers have fallen in recent weeks.

Protesters highlighted France’s weak jobs market, and attacked Socialist President Francois Hollande’s government for ignoring ecomomic issues while pushing ahead with his election pledge of “Marriage for All.”

Banners held up along the march route read: “We want work not gay marriage.”

The Paris police had turned down a request from the protest organisers to march on the Champs-Elysees on the grounds it would be a threat to public order, partly because it borders the French presidential palace.

The demonstrators lined a three-mile route from the Paris business district of La Defense to the roundabout where the Arc de Triomphe is located.

The movement against gay marriage has given France a new celebrity in the form of its public face, Virginie Tellenne, a Parisian socialite who goes by the name of Frigide Barjot.

Her assumed name – a play on the name of French film star Brigitte Bardot, a sex symbol in the 1960s – translates as Frigid Loony.

“We want the president to deal with the economy and leave the family alone,” Ms Tellenne said Sunday.

“We will not give up anything. We came to defend the fact that a father and a mother is better for children,” said Marie, a 30-year-old protestor.

A campaign backed by the mainstream centre-right opposition and various churches has steadily gathered momentum.

But Mr Hollande’s support for the legislation has not wavered and his partner, Valerie Trierweiler, has revealed that the president will be attending the marriages of gay friends once the legislation is on the statute books.

Gay men and women can already adopt as individuals in France if approved by social services.

A separate law on providing medically assisted conception to gay couples, already extended to heterosexual couples unable to conceive, will be debated later in the year.