[en] The aim of the VIRGO experiment is the detection of gravitational waves. The detector is based on a Michelson interferometer with three-kilometer long arms. Before the availability of the complete detector, most of the technical choices have been tested on a small scale interferometer (central interferometer or CITF). This allowed to record the first technical data of the experiment. The calibration of the CITF data has been studied in this thesis. This work involved some local operations such as the calibration of the electronics of the detection system, and also some more global operation such as the characterisation of the detector response function. The latter is used to unfold the data from experimental effects and to estimate the detector sensitivity. A monitoring procedure of this response function has been applied to produce a time series of reconstructed data, i.e. data free from experimental distortions. The implementation of VIRGO will make use of an optical calibrator using the radiation pressure of a laser beam to act on the interferometer mirrors and characterize its response. The optical calibrator has been designed and assembled in laboratory and its performances have been measured. The physics analysis following the calibration step was tackled through a coalescing binary search algorithm. The latter was applied both on simulated data and on CITF data in order to estimate the detector noise level and to check the effects of the reconstruction procedure. (author)