French Characters Not Showing Properly

hi .
I'm having an issue where I can't seem to get the proper French characters to show up
I this code

	$locale = 'fr_FR.UTF-8';
	setlocale(LC_ALL, $locale);
	$event_date =  utf8_encode(strftime($format,strtotime(date("Y-m-d", strtotime("27th August 2013")) . " +".$day." day")));

for some reason it does not work...well, it returns the proper date in French so that works but the month of August which has an accent in it does not process properly

I get this

Mercredi - 28 août, 2013

instead of

Mercredi - 28 août, 2013

any ideas why this would be?

thanks