THE MESSAGE to Lionel Jospin was spelled out bluntly on a French placard: "Can you feel us breathing down your neck?" And they turned out in their thousands to deliver it.
Twenty thousand demonstrators from all over Europe converged on Amsterdam on Saturday, a large proportion of them French, to give a particularly warm but scarcely friendly welcome to the European Union leaders who start their treaty changing summit today.
The summit should be about jobs, social exclusion, the rights of women, the protesters said. There were a few other concerns they wanted to mention while they were at it, from the rights of Kurds to the fight against racism.
All life was there - punks and pensioners, black and white, with whistles, drums and klaxons. Some toyi-toyied to new forms of protest rap. The old guard communists of Italy's Rifondazione Communists set off from Dam Square to a rousing chorus of - what else? - Bandera Rossa.
There were Renault workers, greeted with a huge cheer for their fight against job losses in Brussels, and striking Liverpool dockers.
A Mohican with green spiky hair carried a placard with a picture of Lenin, an old lady, that of Karl Liebknecht, the hero of Germany's communists, while a student defiantly waved a most familiar old wall poster of Che.
One group's banner proclaimed itself "International Black Women for Wages for Housework."
A young woman tried to sell Christian Witness to a man from the Union of Progressive Belgian Jews. The "Committee for a Workers' International" proclaimed in its papers the election of one Joe Higgins in Dublin West.
Everyone was selling to everyone else - mostly messages about the failure of capitalism in different hues - socialist red, environmental green, red green, anarchist black, and red black.
On the ring road round the city over 1,000 bikers sealed roads in protest against EU attempts to reduce noise levels, while 500 Portuguese olive oil workers were due to empty a tanker of their produce somewhere they shouldn't.
A few hundred had walked a good part of the way to the city as part of the "European Marches against Unemployment, Job Insecurity and Exclusion", organised by the European Network of the Unemployed.
Contingents, including 17 marchers from Ireland, had set off from as far afield as Morocco, Sarajevo, Finland's Arctic Circle, and Derry.
Mary Murphy, who had walked from Dublin as a member of the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed, described the experience as deeply moving.
Local organising committees housed them on their way and had publicised their passage so that people came out to the doors to cheer them on as they tramped through rural France.
She wasn't looking for the new millennium, only EU action on jobs and the beefing up of the Maastricht criteria by the inclusion of employment. Europe, she said, had to balance its social and economic priorities.
The placards attacked "neoliberalism" and "globalisation", the "militarisation of Europe", or demanded "a 35 hour week" and a "Social Europe".
"Nopasaran!" the Spanish trade unionists chanted, reviving the old Civil War cry, "They shall not pass while the Dutch handed out leaflets urging the legalisation of cannabis.
Not all, mind you, were exactly politically correct - "get a life not a job!" was the message of one young anarchist. But then this is the "real" left, we were told repeatedly, not the carefully manicured, soundbite merchants of New Labour.
Fears of serious violence have so far failed to materialise, although a group of about 150 on Saturday went on the rampage after police had prevented them from occupying the summit conference centre. Windows were broken and there, were a few arrests.
As for the "mass vomit", promised on the Internet, its organisers clearly hadn't the stomach.
