Accented characters in French

I have been utterly unable to make the accented characters (in this case French) display properly. In Personal Settings, when choosing français, the accented characters are gibberish.

I 've tried setting a default charset in an .htaccess file, UTF-8 is set as the default, and web pages on my servers display french accents correctly on stand-alone pages.

My RC sites are running on Linux, both Apache 1.3 and 2.x I downloaded the source files to my Mac, and the accents in the language array and FR localization files only read correctly if I open them using BBedit with UTF-8.

Can anyone offer a suggestion?

Dan Hinckley
Gingins, Switzerland
Small Point, Maine