Over the last decades, M dwarfs have attracted increasing attention and were identified as targets of choice for the hunt of exoplanets located in the habitable zone of their host star, and for the study of magnetic fields in cool stars. Nonetheless, their study still represents a great technical and scientific challenge because of the intrinsic faintness of these stars. This thesis is dedicated to the study of M dwarfs, and in particular to their characterization from high-resolution and high signal-to-noise ratio near-infrared spectra acquired with the spectro-polarimeter SPIRou installed at the Canada-France- Hawaï Telescope. We use state-of-the-art synthetic spectra to constrain the atmospheric parameters of M dwarfs, taking advantage o...