there is Œ / œ ... but there does not seem to be a consensus on whether they are truely required for French
That depends on what your requirement is. If typography is of a concern, then they are mandatory. œuf, cœur and œuvre spring to mind. This is actually a very good litmus test for see how your server and browser speak to each other. Sometimes you see little diamonds, sometimes nothing, sometimes an OE ligature. You can also use either ISO Latin-9, or œ if those alternatives are available.
There's also the AE ligature, that appears in both English and French, but fortunately that's part of ISO Latin-1. Unfortunately it's a rarer beast in French, and probably now considered archaic in English, apart from ægis and præternatual. Encyclopædia seems pretty archaic these days.
Then of course there is the problem of the correct use of space around French punctuation characters. Guillemets, question and exclamation marks, semi-colons and probably a few other glyphs should have a thin non-breaking space before them (or after them in the case of the left guillemet).
In the olde days this rendered with the   ISO entity ( but then your renderer needs to be programmed to deal with it ). Otherwise the modern alternatives appear to be the Unicode THIN SPACE (   ) or NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE (   ) entities.
Note that the three different entities have been used to add spaces inside the three parentheses in the above paragraph (but no spacing here). What you see is what your browser gives you.
Did I say typography is fun?
- another intruder with the mooring of the heat of the Perl
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