ABSTRACT
Pierre Beregovoy was a workingman, and inevitably people saw in his May Day suicide, in 1993, a symbol of the torturous contradictions that he lived, as a man, as a Socialist, and as a public figure. Jean-Pierre Chevenement was, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a hard-line Marxist leftist, and for him, the suicide of Pierre Beregovoy symbolized the "suicide" of a party that remained socialist only in name. Chevenement believed Beregovoy had turned away from socialism, and he often said so. During his long tenure at the head of the Economy and Finance "super-ministry", and as Mitterrand's last Socialist prime minister, Beregovoy came to symbolize the PS"s "conversion" to "realism". Beregovoy, more than many of his privileged comrades, knew that "inflation is a tax that hurts the poor". He believed in a united, welfare-statist Europe, and he felt that if a vast free market was the price to pay for such a Europe, then he was willing to pay it.
