Orienting an undirected graph means replacing each edge by an arc with the same ends. We investigate the connectivity of the resulting directed graph. Orientations with arc-connectivity constraints are now deeply understood but very few results are known in terms of vertex-connectivity. Thomassen conjectured that sufficiently highly vertex-connected graphs have a k-vertex- connected orientation while Frank conjectured a characterization of the graphs admitting such an orientation. The results of this thesis are structures around the concepts of orientation, packing, connectivity and matroid. First, we disprove a conjecture of Recski on decomposing a graph into trees having orientations with specified indegrees. We also prove a new result on packing rooted arborescences with matroid constraints. This generalizes a fundamental result of Edmonds. Moreover, we show a new packing theorem for the bases of count matroids that induces an improvement of the only known result on Thomassen's conjecture. Secondly, we give a construction and an augmentation theorem for a family of graphs related to Frank's conjecture. To conclude, we disprove the conjecture of Frank and prove that, for every integer k >= 3, the problem of deciding whether a graph admits a k-vertex-orientation is NP-complete.
