Le Petit Nicolas (Little Nicholas) is a series of French children's books created by René Goscinny and illustrated by Jean-Jacques Sempé; its first installment was originally published on 29 March 1959.

The work started out as a comic strip, which initially ran in the Belgian magazine Le Moustique between 1956 and 1958, drawn by Sempé and written by Goscinny.

Amandine Fredon and Benjamin Massoubre (I Lost My Body) directed the feature based on the bestselling French children’s book series Le Petit Nicolas.

The narration is a pastiche of childish storytelling, with run-on sentences and schoolyard slang used in abundance, and much of the humour derives from Nicolas’s misunderstanding of adults' behaviour.

This subversive element in Le Petit Nicolas made it an early example of modern children's literature that is centred on the experience of the child's interpretation of the world, rather than an adult's.

The two main characters of another comic series by Goscinny, Iznogoud, begin to take shape in the episode when Nicolas is in summer camp.

Another English translation of Le petit Nicolas, with the title The Chronicles of Little Nicholas, was published in New York by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1993.