Although organic solid-state dye lasers can provide wavelenght tunability in the whole visible spectrum and offers perpectives of low-cost compact lasers, they are still limited by several drawbacks, especially photodegradation. The geometry of a Vertical External Cavity Surface-emitting Organic Laser (VECSOL) enables organic lasers to reach high energies, excellent conversion efficiences and good beam quality, it also enables an external control on many parameters, a feature that we have udes here to study the photodegradation phenomenon as well as some polarization properties of organic solid-state lasers. In the first part of this thesis, we studied the lifetime of the laser upon varying several parameters (pump pulsewidth, repetition rate, output coupling, ...) and we found that the intracavity laser intensity, independently of the pump intensity, had a major on photodegradation rate. Moreover, we observed that the profile of the laser beam was also degrading with time : while it is Gaussian in the beginning it gradually shifts to an annular shape. In the second part, we investigated the polarization properties of VECSOLs, with a special emphasis on fluorescence properties of some typical dyes used in lasers. The crucial role played by resonant nonradiative energy transfers between dye molecules (HOMO-FRET) is evidenced and enables explaining the observed fluorescence depolarization, compared to the expected limiting fluorescence anisotropy. Energy transfers happen to play a negligible role above laser threshold, as the organic laser beam is shown to be linearly polarized in a wide range of experimental conditions when excitation occurs in the first singlet state.