But the whole movement could have been stopped if the faculty and administration had not reacted to the provocation of the students with such equivocation. Bewildered and angry with no precedent to guide them, they frantically applied stop-gap measures. Wooing the students one week and calling in the cops the next created a great tension at the faculty. The students never knew what was going to happen to them. Insecure and fearful, students banded together in a community-something almost unknown at a French university.

THE STORY of "les evenements" is old now. Everyone in Paris talks about it in the same way they talk about the Commune of '71 or the Revolution of '86.

The music of life in France can be savage and wild one moment and tranquil and melancholy the next. In May the government had completely abdicated power and ten million workers had joined the students in the streets. Came September and not only were the students isolated from the population but again badly split among themselves.

A deep psychological depression has hit the student movement this year. After the first round of rallies at the "red" department of sociology at Nanterre the past autumn, one marxistleninist who had never before talked in Freudian terms lamented to one old comrade, "you know what's wrong? Une maladie psychologique." A girl, an influential member of March 22. which fell apart over the summer, said simply, "I'm depressed." The result was political action by rote. Uninspired, the students mechanically applied the old tactics of May. They called the professors and cops dirty names, they occupied buildings and boycotted classes, they covered the walls with "It's only a beginning. Continue the combat."

But the professors ignored them, the police brutally and effectively cleared the buildings, and the rest of the students yawned as they read the slogan for the hundredth time. The worst, they didn't believe what they were doing themselves.

All the groups took refuge in their ideological backrooms and there hesitantly tried to piece together future plans. As usual, their plans didn't match. The only consensus is that something will happen in the future, but not in the same way.

They are right in at least one sense. Student protest has lost its romanticism, at least one sense. Student protest has lost its romanticism.