  In this self-contained book, following Edward Witten, Maxim Kontsevich, Greg
Kuperberg and Dylan Thurston, we define an invariant Z of framed links in
rational homology 3-spheres, and we study its properties. The invariant Z,
which is often called the perturbative expansion of the Chern-Simons theory, is
valued in a graded space generated by Jacobi diagrams. It counts embeddings of
this kind of unitrivalent graphs in the ambient manifold, in a sense that is
explained in the book, using integrals over configuration spaces, or, in a dual
way, algebraic intersections in the same configuration spaces. When the ambient
manifold is the standard 3-sphere, the invariant Z is a universal Vassiliev
link invariant studied by many authors including Guadagnini, Martellini and
Mintchev, Bar-Natan, Bott and Taubes, Altsch\"uler and Freidel, Thurston and
Poirier... This book contains a more flexible definition of this invariant. We
extend Z to a functor on a category of framed tangles in rational homology
cylinders and we describe the behaviour of this functor under various
operations including some cabling operations. We also compute iterated
derivatives of our extended invariant with respect to the discrete derivatives
associated to the main theories of finite type invariants. Together with recent
results of Massuyeau and Moussard, our computations imply that the restriction
of Z to rational homology 3-spheres (equipped with empty links) contains the
same information as the Le-Murakami-Ohtsuki LMO invariant for these manifolds.
They also imply that the degree one part of Z is the Casson-Walker invariant.
