diff --git a/CHANGES b/CHANGES
index 5a12230ce..184febd6d 100644
--- a/CHANGES
+++ b/CHANGES
@@ -45,6 +45,8 @@ Bugs fixed
 * #1162, PR#139: singlehtml builder didn't copy images to _images/.
 * #1173: Adjust setup.py dependencies because Jinja2 2.7 discontinued
   compatibility with Python < 3.3 and Python < 2.6.  Thanks to Alexander Dupuy.
+* #1185: Don't crash when a Python module has a wrong or no encoding declared,
+  and non-ASCII characters are included.
 * #1188: sphinx-quickstart raises UnicodeEncodeError if "Project version"
   includes non-ASCII characters.
 * #1189: "Title underline is too short" WARNING is given when using fullwidth
diff --git a/sphinx/util/__init__.py b/sphinx/util/__init__.py
index 8bedda126..229c3ad6b 100644
--- a/sphinx/util/__init__.py
+++ b/sphinx/util/__init__.py
@@ -323,15 +323,15 @@ def parselinenos(spec, total):
 def force_decode(string, encoding):
     """Forcibly get a unicode string out of a bytestring."""
     if isinstance(string, bytes):
-        if encoding:
-            string = string.decode(encoding)
-        else:
-            try:
+        try:
+            if encoding:
+                string = string.decode(encoding)
+            else:
                 # try decoding with utf-8, should only work for real UTF-8
                 string = string.decode('utf-8')
-            except UnicodeError:
-                # last resort -- can't fail
-                string = string.decode('latin1')
+        except UnicodeError:
+            # last resort -- can't fail
+            string = string.decode('latin1')
     return string