The aim of this article is to try to clear up the reason(s) of Voltaire’s deliberate misunderstandings of Leibnizian theodicy. Voltaire cannot be suspected of not knowing very well Leibniz’s philosophy, nor can he be suspected of being opposed a priori to optimism. Thus this article examines, on the one hand, Voltaire’s way of bending Leibniz’s concepts in Candide (moral necessity becomes fatalistic; the best is confused with the good, whereas Leibniz dit not minimize the reality of evil; a blind way of applying general maxims for local problems), and, on the other, Voltaire’s comments on these questions in his Éléments de la philosophie de Newton, as well as certain episodes with Leibnizian overtones in other tales, especially Memnon and Zadig. This way of confronting the two thinkers leads to the hypothesis that Candide may in fact be a Leibnizian device meant to test Leibniz’s theses experimentally.