How to store French words/sentences in flask rest-api (SQLAlchemy) hosted in Heroku(PostgreSQL)?

Question

I'm storing 3 french levels and I'm storing the level name as VARCHAR because I read that postgresql doesn't support NVARCHAR

class Level(db.Model):
    id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    level_name = db.Column(db.VARCHAR(250))

Here's what I'm trying to store:

level1 = Level(level_name= 'Débutant')
level2 = Level(level_name= 'Intermédiarie')
level3 = Level(level_name= 'Avancé')

And here's the output in Json:

[{"id":1,"level_name":"D\u00e9butant"},
{"id":2,"level_name":"Interm\u00e9diarie"},
{"id":3,"level_name":"Avanc\u00e9"}]

Things I have tried and didn't work:

1. Changing the type to Unicode
2. Setting the locale to French with flask-babel
3. Storing u'Débutant'