Modest cultural exchanges resumed, most famously and intense study visits by Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of "Democracy in America" (1835). The book was immediately a popular success in both countries, and to this day helps shape American self-understanding. American writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Ralph Waldo Emerson appealed to an appreciative French audience. French utopian socialists Projected an idealized American society as a model for the future. French travelers to the United States were often welcomed in the name of the Lafayette, who made a triumphant American tour in 1824. Numerous political exiles found refuge in New York.