What was going on when I was born?

France and Britain made clear today that they are unwilling to offer the United States any major concessions to halt American trade sanctions against Western European companies involved in the construction of the Soviet natural gas pipeline. The countries' positions were stated by President Francois Mitterrand and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at a joint news conference here at the end of two days of regularly scheduled talks. The relative firmness of their remarks was surprising because reports from Washington have indicated that the United States and its main European allies were making progress on a unified trade policy toward the Soviet Union that could lead to a lifting of the sanctions. Mrs. Thatcher offered an additional expression of distress concerning American policy. After praising a French decision to abstain in a United Nations vote on an Argentine motion calling for immediate talks on the future of the Falkland Islands, Mrs. Thatcher said the United States vote in favor of the resolution was ''incomprehensible and disappointing.''

Nearly 1,000 unidentified bodies have been discovered in six cemeteries over the last few weeks. The discovery has heightened public suspicions that the military, despite its denials, was responsible for the fate of 6,000 people who disappeared during a leftist insurgency in the 1970's. A judge has already noted that the register at one cemetery gives ''military confrontation'' or a similar reason as the cause of death of 31 people from among 156 unidentified bodies. Human rights leaders are now seeking court orders to have all the bodies exhumed for identification.

Tom Pangborn, who was once extolled by Seventh-day Adventist ministers as a model for other youths and later became an Adventist pastor, is severing his ties with the church. From the time he began to doubt some of the church's teachings, the slow alienation has been ''excruciating,'' said Mr. Pangborn, a sixth-generation Adventist. The church is far more than a religious organization to its members; it is a closely woven way of life. Mr. Pangborn, who is 33 years old, was not alone in his crisis of faith. At a time when it has reached unparalleled levels of adherents and wealth, one of America's most distinct religious traditions is being tested both by modern change and by close examination of its own history.

On the basis of unofficial and disputed returns, Gov. James R. Thompson, the Republican incumbent, appeared today to have won the unusually close gubernatorial race here. With 3,616,865 ballots cast, Mr. Thompson held a thin margin of 9,401 votes. He formally claimed victory in an emotional address at his campaign headquarters here. But so did his Democratic opponent, Adlai E. Stevenson 3d, who said he was equally certain that the official election canvass Nov. 22 would make him the governor instead.

In four years as Chancellor of the New York City public schools, Frank J. Macchiarola has replaced over 60 percent of the system's high school principals, using forced retirements, reassignments and outright dismissals to bring about much of the turnover. It has been an upheaval in a system that often treated high school principals as absolute rulers with lifetime powers over their domains. The performance of the new appointees will be a matter of importance to the future of public education in the city. Research findings have increasingly pointed to the principal as the fulcrum upon which a school's fortunes are balanced. ''Having the right to run a school for a lifetime does not make sense,'' Mr. Macchiarola said. ''Tenure for principals is an obstacle because it creates a sense of security that ought not be there.''

With more than 11,551,000 people out of work in October, the nation's unemployment rate rose three-tenths of a percentage point to 10.4 percent of the labor force, another post-Depression high, the Labor Department announced today. Virtually every section of the Bureau of Labor Statistics report on seasonally adjusted employment and unemployment was negative. Another 290,000 people joined the jobless rolls in October. There were 99,093,000 people employed last month, a decline of 630,000 since September and a total drop of 1.8 million since the recession began in July 1981.

Four high-ranking Cuban officials, including the chief of the Cuban Navy, were among 14 people indicted here today on Federal charges of smuggling narcotics into the United States. Stanley Marcus, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, who announced the indictment, said he believed this was the first time an official of the Government of President Fidel Castro had been charged with such offenses. He said the indictment was strictly a criminal matter and was not a foreign policy maneuver. A Cuban official in Washington said today that the charges against the four Cubans were ''all lies.'' There was no immediate comment from Havana.

President Reagan today nominated Under Secretary of the Interior Donald P. Hodel as the new Secretary of Energy, settling one of a broad variety of personnel questions that the Administration faces as it reaches midterm. These questions range from administrative to political matters. White House officials also disclosed that Mr. Reagan had settled another important question by persuading his close friend, Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada, to take over as the new chairman of the Republican National Committee. The Senator is expected to play a supervisory role in the party and to be assisted by an executive in charge of day-to-day details. He would succeed Richard Richards, who has announced that he is stepping aside.

Smuggling, as natural to Lebanon's economy as armed violence has been to its politics, still thrives in this Mediterranean port five miles up the coast from Beirut, as it does at several other ports. The administration of President Amin Gemayel urgently needs money to pay Lebanon's enormous postwar bills, and so, according to Lebanese and diplomatic officials, the Government is planning to squeeze one of the nation's most profitable private enterprises -the illegal importation of goods estimated to be worth $1.4 billion a year. What the Government hopes to curtail is a peculiar kind of smuggling, unlike the ancient enterprise that probably began when Lebanon was still Phoenicia. Cargo ships, not all of them ruststreaked, regularly unload openly in daylight at the jetty here and at several other ports controlled by the Christian militia that calls itself the Lebanese Forces.

About 20 policemen stormed the Turkish national travel agency in Amsterdam today, breaking down the door with a sledgehammer and ending a two-hour takeover by 10 opponents of Turkey's military regime. A police spokesman said that none of the 10 carried weapons and that they put up no resistance.

Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou has announced after a visit to Rumania that the Greek and Rumanian Governments have agreed to call a conference of Balkan leaders to discuss turning the region into a zone free of nuclear weapons within 18 months. On Thursday night, at the end of his three-day visit, Mr. Papandreou told Greek reporters accompanying him that the objective of a Balkan conference would be to put pressure on the rest of Europe to ''denuclearize.'' He reiterated that his Government ultimately wanted to expel American bases from Greece and withdraw from the military wing of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

About 13,000 gallons of lightly radioactive water spilled inside a Belgian nuclear power plant today and a small amount of lightly radioactive gas escaped into the atmosphere when a compressor pump malfunctioned, the Government said. The Public Health and Environment State Secretary, Firmin Aerts, said the water remained inside the Tihange plant 50 miles east of Brussels and was pumped into a special holding tank.