The site had been a mint long before it was a theatre. When the French army bombarded Brussels in 1695, leveling the medieval city around the Grand Place, the rebuilding plan included a permanent opera house, and the location chosen had once housed coin presses. The name La Monnaie, originally spelled La Monnoye in French and De Munt in Dutch, stuck. Maximilian II Emanuel of Bavaria, then governor of the Habsburg Netherlands, ordered the construction and handed his Italian treasurer Gio Paolo Bombarda the task of financing it. Venetian architects Paolo and Pietro Bezzi finished the building between 1695 and 1700. The first newspaper-attested performance, Jean-Baptiste Lully's Atys, took place on 19 November 1700. For the next century, French opera dominated the Brussels stage, and La Monnaie became the second most important French-language theatre in Europe after Paris.

By 1830, Brussels chafed under Dutch rule. La Muette de Portici tells the story of a 17th-century Neapolitan uprising against Spanish occupation, and its incendiary potential was obvious enough that King William I had banned it for over a year. When the ban was finally lifted that August, the theatre was full. Accounts differ on exactly which moment lit the fuse, but the second-act duet "Amour sacre de la patrie" - sacred love of country - is the one history remembers. Spectators rose from their seats, poured out onto the Place de la Monnaie, and were met by demonstrators who had already gathered for the king's birthday. The riot spread. Within weeks, Belgium had declared independence. Within a year, it had a king of its own. The building that stood there that night was the second on the site, a neoclassical hall built by Louis Damesme in 1819. It burned to the ground twenty-five years later, on 21 January 1855, leaving only the outside walls and portico standing.

The architect Joseph Poelaert, who would later design the colossal Palace of Justice that still dominates the Brussels skyline, was given fourteen months to rebuild La Monnaie. He did it. The new auditorium, with 1,152 seats, opened on 28 March 1856 with Fromental Halevy's Jaguarita l'Indienne. Poelaert's foyer and hall mixed neo-Baroque, neo-Rococo, and neo-Renaissance styles with the unembarrassed maximalism of the era - gilded carton-pierre everywhere, red velvet, brocade, and a vast crystal chandelier of gilded bronze and Venetian crystal that still hangs in the centre of the domed ceiling today. The original dome painting, Belgium Protecting the Arts, was produced in the Parisian workshop of Francois-Joseph Nolau and Auguste Alfred Rube, two of the Paris Opera's leading decorators. Soot from the chandelier eventually ruined it. Rube repainted it himself in 1887 with his new associate Philippe-Marie Chaperon, and that version - taken down in 1985, restored from 1988 to 1998, and reinstated in 1999 - is what audiences see overhead now.

La Monnaie has always punched well above its size. Vincent d'Indy premiered Fervaal here in 1897 and L'Etranger in 1903. Ernest Chausson's Le Roi Arthus had its world premiere in 1903, Sergei Prokofiev's The Gambler in 1929, and John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer on 19 March 1991 - a work that would generate decades of controversy at houses around the world. The Belgian composer Philippe Boesmans treated La Monnaie almost as a home theatre across four decades, premiering La Passion de Gilles in 1983, Reigen in 1993, Wintermarchen in 1999, and Julie in 2005. Jules Massenet's Herodiade opened here in 1881. The orchestra reached its peak under Sylvain Dupuis in the late 19th century, then slid for decades, then was rebuilt in the 1980s by music director Sylvain Cambreling under the legendary general director Gerard Mortier.

In 1959, director Maurice Huisman invited a young avant-garde choreographer named Maurice Bejart to choreograph The Rite of Spring. The success gave rise to the Ballet of the 20th Century, founded in 1960, which made La Monnaie one of the centres of European dance for nearly thirty years, until Bejart left in 1987 after a public conflict with Mortier. Mark Morris and his New York company arrived the next year and stayed until 1991, premiering L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato in 1988 and The Hard Nut in 1991 - works now considered foundational to American contemporary dance. Under Bernard Foccroulle in the 1990s, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's company Rosas became the resident dance company. The current music director, Alain Altinoglu, has had his contract extended to 2031. Christina Scheppelmann became general director on 1 July 2025. The audience walking back out of the theatre on a warm evening today crosses the same square where, in 1830, a country began.