How to type French character in LaTeX

If you load inputenc with the utf8 encoding option (make sure that your editor is also configured to use Unicode), you can input those characters directly from your keyboard:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

\begin{document}
Ç et ç
\end{document}

A few comments (added by herve):

If your keyboard has not a french layout, the way to input it are (on a mac using international keyboard: alt+c , on a linux box compose followed by coma followed by c.

\c c should work without use of \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}.

Simply \c{c}, no space.

I believe you are trying a space between \c and {c}.