[en] This work is devoted to the equilibrium and stability of rotating plasmas. Apart from its theoretical interest, this subject has become of practical importance in fusion research, due to the use in recent tokamak experiments of auxiliary heating methods such as neutral-beam injection, which can produce large plasma flows. Flow velocities up to the ion sound speed have been measured on different machines and new phenomena associated with the flow, such as distorsions of the plasma equilibrium profiles, have been observed. As a consequence, flows must be included in the macroscopic description of plasma equilibrium, which is the basis for the analysis and the design of magnetic confinement machines, and the stability properties of equilibria with flows need to be investigated. Here, attention is centered on toroidal confinement machines and in particular on tokamaks. However, some of the results to be presented may be of interest also for other domains (strong mass flows also occur in astrophysical and geophysical contexts such as in the Jovian magnetosphere or in the Earth's magnetopause and plasmapause. It should be noted that equilibrium and, in particular, stability with flows are poorly understood at present. Therefore, many of the questions we will consider are of quite a general nature. We are not yet at the point where quantitative comparisons with specific experiments can be made. Even the choice of a convenient model to study plasma flow is far from being evident. So far most of the theoretical investigations have used the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) model, which is one of the simplest descriptions of a plasma. In this work, however, it will be shown that, for rotating plasmas, the 'simple' MHD model can give very complicated and physically meaningless results, while more 'complicated' models can provide a simpler and more realistic description of the plasma behaviour. 65 refs., 8 figs., 3 tabs