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50 years ago, a new French revolution seemed a possibility. It started as a student protest in which limited demands about students’ rights mixed with vaguer aspirations to a new order of love and peace. For a week or two it seemed incoherent and ignorable. But then, 50 years ago this week, it spilled over into the real world - it sparked the largest strikes in French history and brought the economy temporarily to a halt. Was this the revolutionary moment, in which the intellectuals and the workers could join forces, and create a new society? No - after two weeks, the dream, or threat, faded as De Gaulle called for fresh elections The students had a wider, vaguer idea of revolution than the workers’ leaders. Some gladly admitted the unrealistic, utopian nature of their cause. One graffiti slogan summed this up: “Be realistic – demand the impossible.” One placard declared - “Marxist, Groucho tendency." May 68 could be seen as the first realisation that idealism about creating a perfect world can’t really be confined to the box we call politics. The desire for justice can be anarchic. To many who side with radical causes, this is a dubious development - they echo Karl Marx’s disdain for utopian dreamers and religious socialists, whose warm words evaded the task of seizing power from the capitalists. But in fact even those on the hard left today can’t do without an idealistic, even utopian, aspect. So on the one hand radicals are inspired by dreams of a perfect world - on the other hand they are unsettled by such impractical utopianism. Such ambivalence is understandable - in the rough world of politics, any extreme, perfectionist moral vision can be seen as rather embarrassing. Historically, the Christian church had the same issue. It had to balance its vision of perfect love and justice with its involvement in practical politics. Nowadays it is far less involved in practical politics, far freer to communicate this vision. Yet it is still hard to articulate, for perfectionist morality sits uneasily with human beings - we can’t help turning it into something narrow and self-serving. In Christian terms, we have to wrestle with the paradox - though we are called to perfection, we are sinners. We can either give up and say perfectionist ideals are a waste of time - or we can be honest and realistic - admit that we feel called to something beyond our provable capabilities. It’s an insight that those of other religions and non-religious people can share - it’s there in that graffiti - ‘Be realistic: demand the impossible.’