After the Treaty of Versailles was signed the Weimar Republic was never a French puppet state and was never regarded as such.
Vichy France existed merely to rule those parts of Southern-Central France that the Germans did not initially want to occupy. By November 1942 its independence - if it can even be called that - was gone, it was occupied by the German Army. Even Petain had effectively given up any pretence that he was a real head of a sovereign state - the Army was gone, the Navy had scuttled itself or deserted.
Vichy France was a brutal police state, a collaborationist, anti-Semitic, shadow of the Third Republic, led by increasingly irrelevant men existing in a delusional vacuum of power. The last days of the Vichy Government, after it was forced to flee to a castle in Austria IIRC, was pathetic - squabbling men dictating memos that no-one would ever read about areas that were no longer controlled by them.
