Novice blues with UTF-8, Expat and Python

Hi folks, 
    I've been trying to parse an XML file that contained some French accented characters and the program raised an error. Although you may have a quick answer,
  may I suggest that an example in the Python Expat documentation could have avoided my taking up your time.
   
  Here's the script:
  import codecs
from xml.parsers.expat import ParserCreate
  ifh = codecs.open("FrenchText.xml","r","utf-8")
text = ifh.read()
ifh.close()
parser = ParserCreate("utf-8")
parser.Parse(text)

  Here's the content of the XML file:
  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Book> 
  <Para>Un été torride</Para> 
</Book>

  Here's the error:
  UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 58: ordinal not in range(128)
   


To boldly go photographing where everyone has been before.