Short answers, pulled from the story.
Durkheim formally established sociology as an academic discipline. In 1895, he founded the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux and became France's first professor of sociology. He also founded L'Année sociologique, the first French social science journal, in 1898.
Durkheim defined a social fact as any way of acting that is general throughout a given society and exercises external constraint on individuals, existing independently of any individual's will. Social facts can be material, such as a flag, or immaterial, such as norms, beliefs, and sentiments. He argued that social facts must be explained by other social facts, not by individual psychology.
Durkheim proposed egoistic suicide, resulting from low social integration; altruistic suicide, resulting from excessive social integration; anomic suicide, resulting from insufficient social regulation; and fatalistic suicide, resulting from excessive social regulation. He used this framework in his 1897 study Suicide, which compared suicide rates among Roman Catholic and Protestant populations.
Durkheim defined religion as 'a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, i.e., things set apart and forbidden, beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.' This definition avoids any reference to God or the supernatural, treating religion as a fundamentally social institution.
Durkheim described collective consciousness as the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society, forming a system with a life of its own. It is the moral basis of society and holds it together by emotionally binding individuals to shared culture. He coined the term, and it has since passed into everyday use.
Durkheim died on the 15th of November 1917 in Paris, after collapsing from a stroke. He was buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris. His death came two years after his son André died on the war front in December 1915, a loss from which Durkheim never recovered.