Please, calling it a coup is a joke. France has larger demonstrations almost monthly (at least during non-Covid times), I've seen larger riots in the aftermath of hockey games.
It was a few rednecks rioting...
Read the article. It wasn't a "few rednecks rioting" -- there were two pipe bombs. Elected representatives were in actual danger; capitol police were struggling to hold back the participants. That the "rednecks rioting" were so poorly organized doesn't make it any less a coup. Our elected officials were being sheltered in windowless rooms.
Funny the guy who encouraged everyone to go to the capital (despite the almost universal disagreement) hasn't testified.
That said, it doesn't really matter that the gilets jaunes were protesting for longer and in larger numbers; directly comparing them is a category error. The gilet jaunes were operating within the norms of how French civil society currently operates. The Capitol protesters/insurgents/whatever were expressly trying to overturn them. Maybe not a coup, maybe not treason, but sedition at the very least.
We can't let the laughable ineptitude of these people distract us; they may not be so freakin' stupid the next time they attempt to overthrow our duly elected representatives.
We definitely can. The whole world laughs at the US when they call it a coup. We've seen plenty of real coups in our lifetime, this ain't it.
Coup attempts are not defined by crowd size.
And when crowds do lead to governments being overthrown, usually it's crowds in the millions encouraging those institutions to overthrow the government. Again which didn't happen.
By any definition it wasn't a coup d'état or even an attempt at anything with a chance of success.
No, a coup doesn't have to be by military and government officials (though they are usually best situated, and in any case were involved in the autocoup attempt of which the attack on the Capitol was a part—but neither the whole, the beginning, or necessarily even the end once it failed.)
And a coup attempt can (this specific subtype is called a self-coup, autocoup, or autogolpe) seek to irregularly extend the powers or the term of the current leadership, not overthrow anyone already in power, and this is what the one involving the 1/6 attack was.
And a coup attempt doesn't always involve taking over anything, in the same way a murder attempt doesn't always produce a dead body.
Really though, that's never been successful and calling it an attempt is being extremely generous. It's like saying writing a Tweet is an attempt at writing a novel.
Well, sure, and if that's really what you wanted to do, that would be a (very badly) attempted coup.
On the other hand, if you had a much larger group of “friends”, including high officials of the federal executive branch, federal legislators, state legislators, and others in and out of government, and instead of going from a pub and breaking a few government windows you coordinated on a scheme to substitute alternative electoral votes for the certified ones from several states relying on an abuse of office by the presiding officer of the joint session counting the electoral votes to effect that, when the regular presiding officer publicly rebuffed the effort gathered a few thousand people including multiple organized armed groups to violently assault the Capitol, erecting a gallows and calling for the hanging of recalcitrant presiding officer, having members and legislative staff escape only moments ahead of the mob (and those moments in part because one breakthrough of barricades was stopped by deadly force), delay deployment of National Guard forces to respond to the attack,...
Well, then you’ve got, while in the actual case still unsuccessful, a lot more credible coup attempt.