when using utf-8 encoding, do you have to use the escape characters é or can you just use é,à,è ect…?
The purpose of UTF-8 is that you can just use the characters themselves, without the encoding. 
In UTF-8, the only characters that need to be escaped are [noparse]<, & and "[/noparse], everything else should work fine with just the characters themselves. I say “should” because what you need to be sure is that the editor you’re typing in really is saving the file with UTF-8 encoding. The web is littered with buggy pages where someone has put a <meta charset> in with UTF-8 but not realised their editor is saving it in Windows-1252…