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Notes -
Say rather on ideological grounds, which is where the two meet. The French Revolution, drunk on its own self-image as titans of rationality, destroyed every social safeguard and descended into an orgy of absurdity and barbarity. The American revolution did not, in fact, do this, and neither did the British revolution.
The breakpoint I'm asserting is not changing the system of government, or even changing religions. It is adopting the belief that your cadre alone has found the universal solutions to every human problem, and that the only reason these solutions won't work is if bad people obstruct your perfect plans. This is not a subtle or ambiguous belief, and it has nothing to do with Protestantism or the English Civil War.
I think the American Revolutionary War was more precisely a war of secession rather than a revolution. A "Declaration of Independence" is synonymous with a statement justifying secession, and IMO the American document is an excellent basis for analyzing other secessionary movements. Arguably, the Constitutional Convention resulted in an actual revolution--in that it replaced the government under the Articles with the Constitutional system, and not via a means permitted under the Articles--though an effectively bloodless one.
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