French pronunciation is more regular than English, even if the rules are complicated and do have exceptions. So natives and learners need pronunciation information less often than they do with English. Nonetheless most dictionaries do include phonetic transcriptions, so I’m a little puzzled why you feel a lack of those. (What doesn’t exist for French is a wide collection of pronunciation dictionaries. Most words have a single pronunciation.)

Online, Wiktionnaire has a wide collection of words and usually includes phonetic transcriptions, so it’s a good resource for pronunciation, even if its definitions are often lacking. It’s also worth mentioning projet Shtooka¹, a database of audio snippets of French natives pronouncing single words (and a few expressions).

¹ _{Thanks to F’x for introducing me to it.}

Update edit

The answer below is now outdated, but to mention a currently maintained alternative (I’m just a user of their service) here:

http://www.voicerss.org/api/demo.aspx (the quality is excellent)

Original answer

I just wanted to mention an online resource available for the purpose of automating these things, or maybe just for a tech-savvy way of having an immediate pronounced example.

Google has an API for that, called "text-to-speech", and it has a french parameter available, which produces quite good results, at least for the vast majority of sentences I tested.

For an example, try this directly in your browser’s URL bar :

http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=fr&q=Excellente%20prononciation

Technically, Google sends you back an mp3 in response to your request to TTS. It means the result may depend on the way your browser handles this type of content (direct play with plug-ins, download of an mp3 file, or link to an external mp3 reader application, like Winamp or other). With many standard and up-to-date browsers, chances are it will directly play without you doing any additional tasks. But again warning, the feature is browser-dependent.

(Side note: one fun and possibly useful thing about this is that you can test the French pronunciation of any character string, including words you’re making up on purpose.)

Lexique is a database of french words which gives the prononciation of each word.

I usually use the Dictionary app pre-installed on macOS. It doesn’t include an audio file, but has the IPA script on each word.

Otherwise, Collins dictionary online includes both audio files and the IPA script. It includes most words I have encountered. The below is an example:

In France, the most celebrated dictionary for the last hundred years and more, has been the “Larousse” dictionary. So, they have created a website for their dictionary : “Larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais”. In this website, they don’t give you the phonetic spelling of words, unfortunately, but they let you hear a recording of their pronunciation, which you can consider as a new form of phonetics.

There is useful tool for this in:https://easypronunciation.com/en/french-phonetic-transcription-converter
One may input a word in french and get its phonetic transcription(IPA). Even sentences and paragraphs.