Well, I have to point out that both the French and American revolutions involved assemblies, parliaments, committees, petitions for redress, etc. And they both involved actual bullets and actual deaths. Followed by new constitutions, bills of rights and the like.
The French revolution did of course go off the rails in a rather spectacular fashion and, while we might debate why this was so, I think the explanation has to be a bit more than the fact that the French were just too damn passionate. The fact that they were surrounded by hostile powers supposedly bent on crushing the revolution, whereas the US was simply too far away for any major power to be able to interfere, might have something to do with it. Plus, the US revolution also doubled as an assertion of national independence; they didn’t have a large, wealthy political and social establishment that was displaced by the revolution, and that might be expected to oppose it, on quite the scale the French had.
In short, I think the circumstances in which the American revolution occurred were much more favourable to successful promotion of the enlightenment ideals of the revolution. But I’m not convinced that the revolution was itself any more enlightened inherently. And we should also note that many of the enlightenment ideals of the French revolution survived through the Terror, and the ensuing dictatorship, and fundamentally changed - in a progressive, enlightened and rational direction - the political culture not only of France but of Europe.
To no-one. It was confiscated by the state governments. When the US signed the Treaty of Paris with the UK in 1783 to end the hostilities, the US government undertook to “earnestly recommend” to state legislatures to recognize the rightful owners of all confiscated lands and “provide for the restitution of all estates, rights, and properties, which have been confiscated belonging to real British subjects”.
The United States also agreed to prevent future confiscations of the property of Loyalists.
All of which was ignored by the individual states, who merrily confiscated property of loyalists without compensation.
In point of fact, France never stopped writing constitutions (if memory serves, it was usually Abbé Siéyès who wrote them). The problem was, none of them produced a stable government capable of securing a prosperous economy and the defeat of those powers that wanted to restore the Bourbons. And even Napoleon had two constitutions.
(Am I right in thinking that the US went through a fair bit of constitutional and political experimentation and amendment around the balance between central and local fiscal and financial powers in the same period? But the difference was, no Continental alliance threatening to invade and overthrow your revolutionary government).
Yes. The US had the Articles of Confederation, but they turned out to be not really fit for purpose, so after a few years they got replaced with the Constitution. That in turn was revised after a few more years by the addition of the Bill of Rights. It wasn’t until 1791 - about fifteen years after the Declaration of Independence - that the US Constitution arrived at substantially the form we are familiar with.
If you call a revolution “enlightened” if it succeeds in replacing the current political system with a better one, I am surprised that you believe that the American Revolution is the last time that has happened. In or around 1990 most of the states in Eastern Europe replaced their communist single party regimes with western style democracies. South Africa abolished the apartheid regime between 1989 and 1994. Many South American nations replaced military dictatorship with democracy during the second half of the last century. More recently Myanmar has changed its constitution to become a “discipline-flourishing democracy”. Now, no one will claim that everything has been just peachy in these countries after their revolutions. But you can hardly claim that all of them have just created a situation where “the new boss is essentially the same as the old boss”.
If you were going to say that a *violent *revolution rarely finds success, you might be closer to the truth. Those have a tendency of creating a situation of instability. But violence is not in the definition of “revolution” - just a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time. Those have happened a lot since the American Revolution.
I did not mean to give that impression-examples of the kind that you mentioned (Hiker) were precisely what I was hoping for. But yes, the violent ones are the ones which usually get all of the press…