Angry Marseilles Calls Its Image Criminal : France: Detractors are threatened with lawsuits. It all started with the 1960s heroin connection.

The second-largest city in France is tired of being insulted, pushed around, slandered and, even worse, taken for granted by the rest of the country.

Fighting back, the Marseilles Establishment has mounted an aggressive campaign to defend its honor against pompous Parisians, libelous Lyonnais, blasphemous Bordelais and anybody else who tries to mock Marseilles.

If the critics persist, the Marseillais warned recently in an open letter, they will be taken into court. One of the country’s biggest newspapers has already been sued.

The letter, signed by 70 of the city’s leading citizens, among them rabbis and priests, doctors, artists and union leaders, and reproduced in full-page advertisements in national newspapers, said in part:

“Marseilles addresses France, Europe and the world. Too much is too much. Enough is enough. Persistent rumors, willful smears, repeated lies, perverse slanders often filled with hate tarnish our image and threaten to slow our growth and reduce our standard of living.”

How did this proud former gateway to the French African Empire fall so low?

Marseilles is one of the oldest cities in France. It dates back to the time of the ancient Greeks and was an important port of the Roman Empire.

The city’s decline began in the 1960s with the “French connection,” chronicled in two American movies, which revealed the city as the main heroin-processing center for the U.S. market.

Then came the “lemonade war” of the mid-1980s, in which more than 50 Marseilles gangsters were gunned down in a dispute over the control of nightclubs on the Mediterranean coast.

Now the “war of the clinics” is sullying the image of the city. This is a kind of “General Hospital” run amok, with a member of the City Council, a doctor, charged with arranging the shotgun murder of another councilman, also a doctor--and creating a crisis for the mayor, who is a brain surgeon.

Never mind that the crime rate in Marseilles is lower than in Paris.

Never mind that the sleazy old port has been cleaned up.

Never mind that Socialist Mayor Robert Vigouroux, the brain surgeon who swamped his opponent in last year’s elections, has 50 ambitious projects to revitalize the city’s drooping economy.

The war of the clinics provided the French press, particularly the Parisian dailies, with a field day. The right-of-center Le Figaro published a photograph of a man on a balcony pointing a gun at the city’s old port.

Vowing revenge, the 750-member Marseilles Bar Assn. promised to sue the next journalist who treats the city unfairly. “Touch our city and you touch lawyers,” said attorney Bernard Guibert, who represents a booster organization called A New Look at Marseilles.

“We intend,” he said, “to sue anyone who defames Marseilles--journalist, author, cinematographer, animator, even the people . . . themselves, who very often denigrate their city instead of defending it.”