Your point about the difference being the absence of conservatism is well made and truely the root difference between the American Enlightenment and the French.
Those interested may want to pick up Gertrude Himmelfarb's book The Road to Modernity, the French, English and American Enlightenments which has a great analysis.
It shows how the English Enlightenment, vastly rooted in Scottish thinking, was the inspiration for the American and the French Enlightenment and what diverse paths they took.
Chapter Four of the Constitution of Liberty by Hayek is great on this subject as well.
Though freedom is not a state of nature but an artifact of civilization, it did not arise from design. The institutions of freedom, like everything freedom has created, were not established because people foresaw the benefits they would bring. But, once its advantages were recognized, men began to perfect and extend the reign of freedom and, for that purpose, to inquire how a free society worked. This development of a theory of liberty took place mainly in the eighteenth century. It began in two countries, England and France. The first of these knew liberty; the second did not.At least the author points out that besides the rationalism of the enlightment making the connection to the irrationality of the islamists difficult, we do have the centralization, revolution for revolution's sake, and the general will issues of the French Enlightenment actually fostering the islamist thinking of today rather than being totally at odds with it.As a result, we have had to the present day two different traditions in the theory of liberty: one empirical and unsystematic, the other speculative and rationalistic –the first based on an interpretation of traditions and institutions which had spontaneously grown up and were but imperfectly understood, the second aiming at the construction of a utopia, which has often been tried but never successfully. Nevertheless, it has been the rationalistic, plausible, and apparently logical argument of the French tradition, with its flattering assumptions about the unlimited powers of human reason, that has progressively gained influence, while the less articulate and less explicit tradition of English freedom has been on the decline.
This distinction is obscured by the fact that what we have called the “French tradition” of liberty arose largely from an attempt to interpret British institutions and that the conceptions which other countries formed of British institutions were based mainly on their descriptions by French writers. The two traditions became finally confused when they merged in the liberal movement of the nineteenth century and when even leading British liberals drew as much on the French as on the British tradition. It was, in the end, the victory of the Benthamite Philosophical Radicals over the Whigs in England that concealed the fundamental difference which in more recent years has reappeared as the conflict between liberal democracy and “social” or totalitarian democracy.
This difference was better understood a hundred years ago than it is today.
The vision of Adimajad and Lenin are fairly similar.
It is no coincidence that Islamic terror finds its most accommodating European quarters in France. (The recent riots were, I suspect, a demonstrable objection against the PACE at which the takeover proceeds, not a declaration that it wasn't proceeding.) France welcomes the kind of totalitarianism incumbent in Islam's version of fascism, the subordination of all individual desires to the collective. The Terror was known -- even by its devout champions -- to be laying waste to France's intelligentsia, its philosophes, even its revolutionaries. (How many of the Jacobins perished on the same scaffold as Louis XVI?) But the sheer momentum of the movement, the fear of asserting any idea different than that of the moment's collective, propelled idealists to become, if not participants, at least silent bystanders in a horror that painted the gutters red with blood.
It is that same fear of individuality the paralyzes France -- and to a lesser extent, England -- today. And it will leave this country vulnerable as well, if we let it.
We need the courage to say what needs to be said and do what needs to be done, the PC collective be damned!