French Characters display as �

I'm setting up a second website for a company and working with a translator
to create a proper French language version. I used DataAssist in the original version with no problems for a data base that is used for questions and answers. The search, results and details page as well as every other page associated with the data base is in a utf-8 format. My SQL database tables etc are also set to the utf8 format ( utf8_general_ci ). I am currently getting the � character in place of the missing french characters such as é etc. It is on a testing site at the moment, and in translation transition. All the characters show properly on the main pages, so it's only the data assist created pages that seem to have the problem. There must be some discrepancy in the encoding somewhere between the server, database and data assist files, but I can't quite sort this out. You can see the results on the testing page at soutienmpengo.html Type in "Cherchez" into the search box and the returning answer displays the problem. I currently only have this first answer in french until I sort out the rest and receive the rest of my translations for the database.
Thanks, and any help or suggestions would be appreciated.