HELP - French Accent with OCI

Hi, I'm using OCI calls to connect on a Oracle 8 database on a Unix system. Whenever I send characters with accents in my SQL query they get converted to an other one. It would seems like the characters would get converted from a 8 bit to a 7 bit character set...... When I send SQL queries trought the oracle client interface with french accents the caracters get stored correctly in the DB. So I don't think the problem is with the DB. It only does it with php.... I need help, i'm desperate : ) Thankx J-F