French Characters in SQL Text field to UTF - 8

I have some french characters stored in a text column in Sql Server(not ntext but text). When I display this on html i get some funny question mark characters in the string.

Even if I convert the text to nvarchar(max) and display on html I still get the same error.

How do I convert the french characters in the text field to UTF-8 correctly? I am using C#, .NET 4.5.

Thank you, GMAT