French Pay Homage to Ex-Premier : Politics: Leaders, ordinary citizens mourn Beregovoy. One worker calls him ‘a man of the people.’

French leaders and citizens of all political stripes Sunday mourned the suicide of Pierre Beregovoy, son of a Normandy grocer, who rose to direct the French economy and served as prime minister until his Socialist Party was defeated in elections in March.

“He wasn’t like the others,” said a weeping French worker interviewed on French television. “He was a man of the people.”

Using a handgun belonging to his bodyguard, Beregovoy shot himself in the head in rural Burgundy on Saturday, dying four hours later in a helicopter en route to a Paris hospital.

In the hours before his death, Beregovoy performed the traditional May Day tasks of the French politician, officiating at the start of a bicycle race in Nevers, where he also served as mayor, and chatting with constituents in a trailer park in the rural district where he won reelection to Parliament by a narrow margin in March.

Those who saw him in those final hours said he looked unusually tired.

He had been deeply depressed by the recent investigation into a no-interest $180,000 loan he received in 1986 from a rich political crony, later indicted for insider trading. The crushing parliamentary defeat of his Socialist Party by an alliance of moderate right-wing parties in March added to his depression.

In the elitist upper reaches of French politics, Beregovoy, who quit school at 15, was an anomaly--a self-made man who rose through the ranks. He was one of the few Socialist Party politicians respected by both left and right.

In a gesture of respect and grief, Edouard Balladur, Beregovoy’s successor as prime minister, on Sunday canceled an important statement he had scheduled for later this week to announce a new economic recovery plan.

In his last public interview, broadcast after his death, Beregovoy described his term as hard and stressed. “We had a recession and an unpleasant political climate, but I take my share of responsibility, along with many others,” he said.

Throughout his career, Beregovoy enjoyed a reputation for integrity and honesty, reflected by his simple, no-frills lifestyle.

The reputation stayed intact in 1989 when an aide at the Ministry of Finance was forced to resign because of alleged involvement in an insider-trading stock market scandal first uncovered by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Beregovoy was unscathed by the affair, but it came back to haunt him in February when the muckraking weekly newspaper Canard Enchaine reported that in 1986 he received an interest-free loan from a businessman who was later charged in the insider-trading scandal.

Beregovoy said he repaid the loan, but the suggestion of impropriety on the part of a man who came to office as prime minister in April, 1992, promising to root out corruption became a factor in the March parliamentary elections.

Former Education and Culture Minister Jack Lang said that Beregovoy, a former trade unionist, was brought down by the Establishment and may have chosen to kill himself on May Day to plead for civilized politics “free of lies and slander.”

“May his appeal be heard. . . . Let us respect each other,” Lang said.

The son of a Ukrainian immigrant, Beregovoy apprenticed as a lathe operator after dropping out of school, then worked as a railroad employee before joining the state-owned gas company. There, he rose to a director’s post, staying on until the Socialists took power in 1981, when he became Mitterrand’s chief of staff.