Problem

• How to use special characters like French accents (é,è,ê,...) or German \"Umlaut\"s (äöü) in loaded files.
• When trying to load a file with accents in clisp, I used to get errors about character conversion to UTF-8 and after countless hours of searching through sites like http://clisp.cons.org/impnotes.html and especially http://www.gnu.org/software/clisp/impnotes/encoding.html, I found for what I was looking for here.

Solution

No need to recompile clisp with some flags for UNICODE, just: