[abus]

I've used the Py2 csv module with csv files containing accented characters and had no issues. Could you post an example?

This works fine, as does the corresponding writer:

    reader = csv.reader(open(FILENAME, 'rb'))
    for row in reader:
        print row

If you want a unicode string it's as simple as:

    value = row[0].decode('utf8')

Then before writing:

    row[0] = value.encode('utf8')