Save Latin characters with accents in Oracle

Question

I am reading some values that are coming from an SQL Server database with collation Latin1_General_CI_AS and saving those to the Oracle db. At the moment I can see that any é character is incorrectly saved as é in the Oracle db.

I tried to specify the collation in a column in the Oracle database using the following but doesn't work. It shows "Invalid ALTER TABLE option".

ALTER TABLE <table name>
MODIFY <column name> VARCHAR2(450)
CHARACTER SET latin1
COLLATE latin1_general_ci;

or

ALTER TABLE <table name>
CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET latin1
COLLATE latin1_general_ci;

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Many thanks