Add to your HTML head:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
Note that you should have a proper HTML doctype because browsers default to non utf8. You can do a simple test, like I did, this works:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
<?php
$title = "Jérôme";
echo $title."<br>";
But the place for the meta tag is in the head tag. The HTML document should look like this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>An XHTML 1.0 Strict standard template</title>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
</head>
<body>
<?php
$title = "Jérôme";
echo $title."<br>";
?>
That is standard.