Support for the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus during the famous 1890s French military scandal, or more broadly, the principles of justice and truth that the case represented.
Named after Alfred Dreyfus, the French-Jewish military officer wrongly accused of treason in 1894. The suffix '-ism' denotes a movement or set of beliefs. The term emerged during the intense public debate over Dreyfus's case.
The Dreyfus Affair split French society in half and created the term 'intellectual'—before this case, people didn't really talk about writers and artists as a unified political force, but famous authors took sides and invented modern activism.
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