The severing of the North Atlantic colonies from England has been called a revolution. But if by revolution you mean deep political upheaval and change, it never really got that revolutionary. When the citizens around Boston Massachusetts rose up in angry mobs during the Powder Alarm, in 1774, while it was one of the gradual steps to war over the British repression in Massachusetts, the panic and alarm didn't spread to the rest of the colonies like the Great Fear of the French Revolution. The war was pretty much managed by the colonial governmental leaders, and they pretty much stayed in power afterwards.

The French revolution was a root-and-branch dismantling of an entire government and society. Starting out as a response to a deep government debt ( partially from helping to fund the American colonies's split from England), the effort to reform and improve the cumbersome hereditary structures went deeper and deeper, going far beyond simply changing the leadership to actually replacing the whole concept of hereditary authority with that of government by and for the citizens. That devolution became extremely destructive, intolerant and disdainful of earlier norms. That deep ideological change really distinguishes the French revolution from the American. The American Loyalists were not guillotined , after their side lost. Although they suffered during the war, they were allowed to take their part in society afterwards as Tories.

I couldn't possibly summarize all the enormous amount that's been written as to why the Colonies didn't descend into a real revolution. Some of that has been pretty self-congratulatory ( we did that because we're Special) . But there was a great difference between the French government of 1789 and the English one of 1775. There had already been a great deal of change previously in England in the 17th c., and some of the notion of a hereditary government was already discarded. The Colonists were able to talk about their rights under the Magna Carta in the same way that the Roundheads in Parliament had done, and Thomas Jefferson could use the existing ideas of John Locke in his Declaration of Independence. The Colonists also didn't really threaten the existence of the British government: they did not invade England and try to reform or uproot it. Also, the North Atlantic colonies were rather economically insignificant. Britain had been slow to send troops over to deal with the Seven Years' War in the Colonies, and it did not put up a very vigorous fight to retain them later. Unlike in France, it was possible perhaps for everyone involved to avoid a really bad fight.

The net effect of each of them was far different. Although the American war did inspire and bolster the initial reform phase of the French Revolution, it did not really spark more revolution abroad. The French Revolution, on the other hand, had real repercussions. It provided an example of real and actual radical governmental change to political thinkers from that point on. It is hard to conceive of radicals like Karl Marx, Anarchists like Proudhon, appearing without the precedent of the French Revolution. The 1848 revolts that swept through much of Europe could be seen as a popular effort to try to do-over the French Revolution. And the reactions to it were also significant: the relatively mild demands by the Chartists in England were met with great horror by the ruling class because they saw them as the thin end of a revolutionary mob that would demand much greater changes- thus the Peterloo Massacre. Past political revolutions, the Napoleonic Wars that came out of the collapse of the Revolution had an enormous effect on European borders, the agreements that ended it had n enormous effect on making Europe more stable through the 19th c.

And in some ways the French Revolution was more consequential for the new United States than the American Revolutionary War. The rise of Napoleon would result in the sale of Spanish Mississippi territory, the Louisiana Purchase. British preoccupation with the Napoleonic Wars would also give the new USA an easily negotiated settlement to the War of 1812. Had the British been less busy, it's possible they would have decided to seriously regain some of what they had lost in 1782.