[en] If fatigue crack initiation is currently quite well understood for pure single crystals, its comprehension and prediction in cases of polycrystal alloys such as AISI 316LN stainless steel remain complicated. Experimentally our study focuses on the characterisation of the mechanical behaviour and on the study at different scales of the phenomenon leading to low cycle fatigue crack initiation in 316LN stainless steel. For straining amplitudes of?e/2 = 0,3 and 0,5%, the cyclic softening observed during testing has been related to the organisation of dislocations in band structures. These bands, formed due to the activation of slip systems having the greatest Schmid's factor, carry the most part of the deformation. Their emergence at free surfaces leads to the formation of intrusions and extrusions which help cracks initiate and spread. Numerically we worked on the mesoscopic scale, proposing a new model of crystalline plasticity. This model integrates geometrically necessary dislocations (GND) directly computed from the lattice curvature. Implemented in the finite element code Abaqus^TM and Cast3m^TM, it is based on single crystal finite deformations laws proposed by Peirce et al. (1983) and Teodosiu et al. (1993). Extended for polycrystals by Hoc (2001) and Erieau (2003), it has been improved by the introduction of GND (Acharya and Bassani, 2000). The simulations performed on different types of aggregates (2D/3D) have shown that taking GND into account enables:- the prediction of the grain size effect on a macroscopic and on a local scale,- a finer computation of local stress field.The influence of the elasticity and interaction matrices on the values and the evolution of the isotropic and kinematic mean stresses has been shown. The importance of boundary conditions on computed mechanical fields could also be pointed out. (author)