Résumé en anglais

We study approximation of the max sat problem by moderately exponential algorithms.The general goal of the issue of moderately exponential approximation is to catch-up onpolynomial inapproximability, by providing algorithms achieving, with worst-case runningtimes importantly smaller than those needed for exact computation, approximation ratiosunachievable in polynomial time. We develop several approximation techniques that can beapplied to max sat in order to get approximation ratios arbitrarily close to 1.