Gaston Defferre, 75; French Socialist, Mayor of Marseilles

Former Interior Minister Gaston Defferre, a feisty Socialist parliamentarian and mayor of Marseilles for more than 40 years, died Wednesday after suffering a head injury in a fall. He was 75.

Defferre died at the University Hospital Center of Timone, a day after he was admitted bleeding profusely from a head wound.

Socialist Party sources said Defferre fainted, hitting his head, while eating a late-night meal after a long political meeting that began Monday night.

Helped Rebuild Socialists

Defferre, who served four times as either a minister or secretary of state under the old Fourth Republic, aided President Francois Mitterrand in rebuilding the Socialist Party in the late 1960s. The Socialists, once a small collection of fractious independents, now are France’s second largest political party behind the Communists.

“It is a great loss for me and a great loss for France,” said a somber Mitterrand after spending 15 minutes with the body of his friend, political ally and fellow fighter in the wartime resistance.

Mitterand had just returned from the summit meeting of the seven major Western industrialized nations in Tokyo.

After the Socialist electoral sweep in May, 1981, Mitterrand named Defferre interior minister and placed him in charge of the government’s key decentralization program.

Defferre was replaced by Pierre Joxe in 1984 during a Cabinet shuffle in which Laurent Fabius took over the premiership from Pierre Mauroy.

Took Obscure Post

After 1984, Defferre served in the relatively obscure position of minister of state for territorial administration under Fabius, who spent several hours at Defferre’s bedside Tuesday afternoon.

The Socialists lost control of the legislature in the March National Assembly elections and Chirac, the mayor of Paris and leader of the center-right coalition, was chosen premier.

Defferre had been mayor since 1944, and was credited with the crackdown on the drug smugglers whose heroin laboratories had turned the city into a key link in the “French Connection.”

A combative figure with a mane of white hair, he hung on to the Town Hall against challenges from the Communists and then from the right, recently allied to the anti-immigrant National Front.

Marseilles is a city of racial tensions, with a large concentration of immigrants, mostly from Algeria, and thousands of Frenchmen forced to leave their colonial homes there when the country achieved independence in 1962.

The independent newspaper Liberation, referring to a famous 1967 incident when Defferre fought a sword duel against a Gaullist deputy whom he had insulted, headlined as Defferre fought for his life: “Gaston’s last duel.”