Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer who lived from the 28th of June 1712 to the 2nd of July 1778. His political philosophy influenced the Age of Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and modern political, economic, and educational thought.
Rousseau's cornerstones in modern political thought are the Discourse on Inequality, which argues that private property is the source of inequality, and The Social Contract of 1762, which outlines a legitimate political order. His novel Julie, or the New Heloise appeared in 1761, and his educational treatise Emile, or On Education in 1762.
Rousseau persuaded Therese Levasseur to give each of their newborns to a foundling hospital, claiming in 1751 he was too poor to raise them. In the Confessions he gave a different reason, that he feared entrusting them to her ill-brought-up family, judging the foundling hospital the lesser risk. Voltaire and Edmund Burke later used the abandonment against him.
Rousseau's Emile and The Social Contract were banned in France and Geneva because their religious views rejected original sin and divine revelation and were read as indifferentism. The Archbishop of Paris condemned him, his books were burned, and warrants were issued for his arrest, forcing him to flee to Switzerland and later England.
After Hume brought Rousseau to England in 1766, a hoax letter by Horace Walpole and critical press reports led Rousseau to suspect a conspiracy involving Hume. The dispute became public in October 1766 and resounded in Geneva, Amsterdam, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. Rousseau returned to France in 1767, and the two men never met again.
Rousseau died on the 2nd of July 1778 at Ermenonville of cerebral bleeding from an apoplectic stroke, possibly linked to earlier falls including a 1776 collision with a Great Dane. He was buried on the Ile des Peupliers, and on the 11th of October 1794 his remains were moved to the Pantheon near those of Voltaire.