Some historians contend that the American Revolution was not a revolution readily compared to others in history. It can be distinguished as a War for Independence or as historian H.W Brands called it, Our First Civil War in his book by that title. Given its close proximity to our own experience The French Revolution offers insights that illuminate both. The French and the Americans both attributed their movements to Enlightenment philosophers; the French followed the words of Rousseau and the Americans followed the ideas of Locke and Montesquieu among others. The Enlightenment was a fork in the road and the French and Americans took very different paths.
In The Wrong Kind of Abundance Kevin Williamson at The Dispatch (firewalled) considered the American experience a conservative revolution:
Of course, the political group that we now call, broadly speaking, the American right has always been convulsed by irreconcilable contradictions because the American project itself is founded in a paradox: There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as a conservative revolution, but that is approximately what the Founding Fathers carried out. And from the New Deal through to the present, the right has been torn between its conservative tendencies and its revolutionary tendencies. Dwight Eisenhower called himself a “progressive conservative”; William F. Buckley Jr. called himself a ”radical conservative” and insisted that whatever it was his new movement was going to stand for, it was against Eisenhower.
Among the founders, there were plenty of wild-eyed utopians and radicals, but the revolution ended up being led by relatively conservative figures such as George Washington and John Adams (who had originally opposed separating from England) and others of similar temperament, who made the case that they were not so much overturning a legitimate political order as restoring and securing their ancient rights as Englishmen. The American project is a marriage between the forces of conservatism (property and religion) and the forces of radicalism (majoritarianism, disestablishmentarianism, etc.), and, to the extent that the American right acts as a conservator of the American tradition, it feels those contradictions deeply.