French characters not rendering in HTML component

I'm unable to get French characters in an .html document to render in the HTML component. For example where the .html code has "é", the HTML component renders "é" in it's place. I have been able to fix this by using "é" in the .html code, but unfortunatly I won't have the freedom to alter the .html code outside of our testing environment.

I imagine some form of localization is required, but whether that's done with the URLRequest, the HTML component, in the .html code or perhaps with the AIR application's settings is something I've not been able to figure out.