The birth of intellectual protest

In relation to Alfred Dreyfus, according to Piers Paul Read:

The term "intellectual", already used by the novelist Guy de Maupassant and by the nationalist man of letters Maurice Barrès, was ridiculed by the anti-Dreyfusards. Barrès referred to the signatories of the manifesto as the "demi-intellectuals", and the literary critic Ferdinand Brunetière questioned the very idea that authors and academics should possess some superior wisdom when it came to the law. "The intervention of a novelist," he wrote, "even a famous one, in a matter of military justice seems to me as out of place as the intervention, in a question concerning the origins of Romanticism, of a colonel in the police force." He castigated scientists too for their arrogant assumption that their insights into the working of the material world somehow placed them on the moral high ground.

Apologies, this is a bit abstract, but I needed a quote. It's almost impossible with my limited erudition to convey the gist of the article here, so I'll just defer to the author's superior understanding of his subject. Here you go.