> Debian SID. No, it wasn't.

Oh ok, gotcha: repr() always returns a str string. If obj.__repr__() returns a 
Unicode string, the string is encoded to the default encoding. By default, the 
default encoding is ASCII.

$ ./python -S 
Python 2.7.2+ (2.7:85a12278de69, Sep  2 2011, 00:21:57) 
[GCC 4.6.0 20110603 (Red Hat 4.6.0-10)] on linux2
>>> import sys
>>> sys.setdefaultencoding('ISO-8859-1')
>>> class A(object):
...  def __repr__(self): return u'\xe9'
... 
>>> repr(A())
'\xe9'

Don't do that at home! Change the default encoding is not a good idea.

I don't think that repr(obj) can be changed to return Unicode if 
obj.__repr__() returns Unicode. It is too late to change such thing in Python 
2.