[en] The minimal flavor violation hypothesis is introduced to resolve an apparent puzzle of particle physics. The current best theory, the Standard Model, is known to suffer from a series of theoretical shortcomings. It should cease to be valid at energy scales higher than a few tens of times the mass of the Higgs boson. At the same time, the presence of new dynamics at that scale should have been felt indirectly at low energy, thanks to the very precise measurements done with K and B mesons, and with leptons, but no conclusive deviation has been observed yet. This contradiction is called the flavor puzzle. In this thesis, after a short overview of the observables indicating the presence of the flavor puzzles, the fundamental principles of Minimal Flavor Violation are introduced and motivated. Then, its phenomenological consequences are described, with particular emphasis to the possibility of resolving the paradox of the apparent stability of the proton, and the related implications for the direct searches of new dynamics at colliders like the LHC. Finally, this thesis concludes by exposing several promising extensions of the Minimal Flavor Violation framework in the lepton sector, Grand Unified theories, or for cosmologically-related problems. (author)