Collation

[Michael J. Pawlowsky]

I just upgraded from 4.0.8 to 4.1.9.
On MySql 4.1.9 my default collation seems to be latin1_swedish_ci.

I need to support french accents. Right now, not sure if it's MySQL or PHP.
But all accented caracters in the database are coming out wrong.

I'm thinking I should just use utf8_general_ci but have no idea what the 
implications are.
Also I have no idea why latin1_swedish_ci.was chosen as my default.

Does anyone have a good link of where I can read up more on choosing a 
collation?
How to create the default?

Or if you have a quick amswer for me that would be great.
Right now almost every 3rd  word displays wrong.

Thanks,
Mike