MITTERRAND, EX-PRESIDENT OF FRANCE.

Byline: Craig R. Whitney The New York Times

Francois Mitterrand, who revived France's Socialist Party into a modern political force and whose election as president ended more than two decades of Gaullist rule, died Monday morning in his official residence here of prostate cancer. He was 79.

"It is a great figure who has left us, and I salute him with emotion and with respect," said President Jacques Chirac, a conservative Gaullist and longtime political adversary of Mitterrand's, who succeeded him in May.

Mitterrand will be buried after a private funeral Thursday morning in Jarnac, the southwestern French village where he was born. A public Mass will be celebrated for him at the same time at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Friends said that Mitterrand did not want a state funeral, but Chirac declared Thursday a day of national mourning and ordered flags be flown at half-staff.

As president, Mitterrand passionately embraced the cause of European unity as his intended legacy. He evidently sought in this crusade propitiation for the political sins of his youth. For most of his political career, Mitterrand kept hidden his service in the wartime collaborationist regime of Marshal Philippe Petain in Vichy, emphasizing instead his work with the Resistance, which he joined only at the end of 1943.

It was only in the twilight of his life, after one of his most notorious former associates - a Vichy police officer - was accused of deporting thousands of French Jews to German camps, that Mitterrand allowed a biographer to reveal the details of his own time as a Vichy bureaucrat.

He dedicated his 14-year presidency, the longest since the Fifth Republic was established in 1958, to building a more united Europe on the foundation of close Franco-German relations.

German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, his closest ally, led the first of many tributes by European leaders Monday. "Europe has lost a great statesman in Francois Mitterrand," he said. "I am mourning a good friend."

Though weakened by his illness, Mitterrand had spent the Christmas holidays in Aswan, in southern Egypt, with his wife, Danielle, and his daughter from outside the marriage, Mazarine Pingeot.

They, the Mitterrands' two sons, Mitterrand's brother Robert and other relatives were with him when he died at 8:30 a.m. Monday in his official apartment near the Ecole Militaire on the Left Bank of Paris, according to his doctor, Jean-Pierre Tarot.

Mitterrand's election to the first of two terms in 1981 crowned his single-handed revival of the French Socialist Party, which he had headed for more than a decade.

Mitterrand's election represented the biggest shift in French politics since the end of World War II. Mitterrand was the first non-Gaullist to occupy the Elysee Palace in the brief history of France's Fifth Republic, and tens of thousands of Parisians celebrated his victory far into the night, marching along the Boulevard Beaumarchais singing the "Marseillaise" and holding a rally at the Bastille.

In his first months in office, Mitterrand and the new National Assembly, in which the Socialists and other parties of the left had a majority, nationalized banks and major industries, raised the French minimum wage, and increased government spending.

But these efforts failed to halt unemployment and rising inflation, and French voters began to have second thoughts about the Socialists' policies. When control of the National Assembly was returned to the rightist parties in 1986, Mitterrand tried to work with a prime minister from the opposition, Chirac. This attempt at "cohabitation," as Mitterrand called it, ended as enough of a success for Mitterrand to be re-elected president two years later.

Pragmatic centrism rather than doctrinaire socialism characterized much of Mitterrand's 14-year tenure.

Mitterrand's presidency was also marked by grand public works that changed the face of Paris, including a gigantic square-edged modern arch at the city's western portals, a modern opera house at the Bastille, and a vast new National Library built on the eastern side at the end of his second term.

But of all of his legacies to the city, he was proudest of the revitalization of the Museum of the Louvre, a project capped by the construction of a new entrance under a frame-and-glass pyramid designed by I.M. Pei and placed in the palace's western courtyard.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO

Francois Mitterrand, 79, who led France for 14 years, died Monday of cancer. Associated Press